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Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

I sometimes wonder about these huge deals like this...

Is there a bunch of AWS sales people who just became instantly "Fuck You Money"-rich as part of their sales commission on this deal?

I don't know how it works in FAANGS for sales commission, but I've heard of 5-10% being "normal"... so sales comp on this deal @ 5% comp is 150 mil? If so, are there loads of sales people just kicking around waiting for their "one big sale" and then insta-quit and go live on their own private island?

And if commission is capped, then surely the flip side is now there are loads of disgruntled sales people sitting around spitting teeth and annoyed that they just pulled in 3 billion for the company but they "only" got 100K capped-commission or whatever and so rage-quit and go somewhere else?

Anyone know how this sort of thing pans out?

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No idea.

It's not clear what was sold by the saleperson since Pinterest could have just self-served themselves infrastructure off any combination of platforms. Presumably the idea is they're getting a discount in exchange for having this incentive favoring exclusivity. Their commission might also be amortized over the length of the contract (2029) since that's the length of time the value is generated.

I would guess they have bonuses which scale with sales and not a direct commission.

This is not a new contract - Pinterest has been using AWS since at least 2013 (I used to work in a company that Pinterest purchased a service on AWS from, and Pinterest was our largest customer by far on AWS even then.) So maybe they've gone from 200-odd or 300-odd to 400 million an year. I bet that would affect the commission dynamics too, but I'm sure it's a decent chunk of change nonetheless.

Looking at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4004551, their AWS bill was about $100,000 a month back in 2012.

So it was $100,000 a month for 18 millions visitors, and it is now $20,000,000 a month for 454 millions MAU.

Corey Quinn has to take a look at this.

EDIT: Corey provided some insight on contract negotiation at https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1430327936519872514

Very often commission is paid out on profit.

So it'd not be 5% of 3B but 1B (assuming 30% margin, but it's probably less on a deal this size). Still quite a nice chunk of change.

But, after that less-than-ethical companies often try to inflate costs as much as possible to even further reduce commission.

>Is there a bunch of AWS sales people who just became instantly "Fuck You Money"-rich as part of their sales commission on this deal?

No. Do you think "Fuck You Money"-rich people are being minted every time a billion dollar government contract is awarded?

That is the question

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