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Comment by riazrizvi | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand the framing here, where they need to justify why they get paid. They created and secured a thing and sell off chunks of it along the way when it suits them. What’s strange about that? If you buy a cheap stretch of land in the middle of nowhere and develop it and sell pieces of it off, that’s just understandable.

When you come on board as an employee, you’re just not in the same situation.

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There's nothing wrong with getting paid. But there is something wrong with pretending like you aren't getting paid in order to play on people's sympathy, so that they will accept getting paid less.

Using your analogy, this is Alice bought a cheap stretch of land in the middle of nowhere, and wanted to develop it, but she couldn't afford to pay Bob to develop it. Alice then offers to pay Bob a smaller portion of money and some of her land in exchange for developing it. Bob has other clients looking to pay him more money, but he decides to take Alice's contract because he wants the land.

Why is Bob not in the same situation? They both are taking a financial loss in the hopes of having more valuable land to sell. Why shouldn't Bob have the same right to sell his portion of the land that Alice has?

There's a moral justification, and a desire to change the social norm, versus the terms of an agreement. This is where educational articles like this are important to improve the understanding throughout the industry so that employees can make informed choices.

>>Why is Bob not in the same situation?

In this specific circumstance, Bob agreed to an arrangement that contractually doesn't put him in the same situation. Hopefully Bob will learn from this experience and, if possible, negotiate better (or equivalent rights) instead of willingly agreeing to unequal rights.

Pragmatically, unless and until more workers are willing to take the risk to become founders themselves, the balance of power usually is in the founders' and investors' favour (i.e. capital).

> They created and secured a thing

They did not do that alone. If they had, there would be no employees to keep secrets from.

It's hard to make this point without a normative argument, but by analogy to land, a company is not only the land but also the workers laboring on it. It's reminiscent of serfdom. The serfs are attached to the land, and they own very little of it (if at all, and with many strings attached), even though their continued work is a large reason why the land would be considered valuable in the market in the first place.

But this analogy fails, too, because in Silicon Valley, the serfs aren't attached to the land. Generally, someone who's an early employee at a tech startup has the option to go be an early employee at a different tech startup, without too much hardship. They aren't tied to the company the same way a serf is, where uprooting one's life to go work a different stretch of land was absurdly difficult, if not impossible.

This makes sense if you're coming in as employee #50, but what's the difference between a founder and the first engineer?

The difference between the founders and the first employee is the founders own the company

what happens if the founders subsequently run the company into the ground, having personally enriched themselves off their employees work, who they then destroyed the upside for?

should the employees have a legal claim against the money that was taken in the secondary transaction?

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