Comment by fadesibert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fadesibert | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not sure how much that's creating outsized income for the founder...

There are between 98 (2022 annual report number) and 120 (ZoomInfo) and 133 (LinkedIn number). German filings are notoriously opaque vs Europe or UK.

So that's 637k EUR / 120 employees (although the payroll number jumps around between 450 and ~640 - weird, but who knows, # of employees shifting around or some paid quarterly or on commission?).

That's around 5,300 EUR / month per employee, or 64k / year. Germans notoriously don't work on the cheap - so unlikely that everyone else is working below market to line the CEO's pockets.

That said - they are still a profit seeking enterprise (another commenter noted that they aren't gGMBH - but also they set up a Feeder fund in January - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1999332/000199933224...)

Which presumably CAN be profit seeking.

So yeah - it doesn't invalidate their mission - if you're into that - but it's not 100% of what it says on the tin.

Also - monthly financial statements may be a German thing (sorry, I actually quite like Germany and Germans - just German company law is quite cumbersome) - but annual statements would give a clearer and more transparent picture.

> That's around 5,300 EUR / month per employee

If the salary is 4300 (instead of 5300) per employee for those 120, that would give the CEO the extra 120x1000 per month.

I am not implying the CEO does that, I am merely saying that "non-profit" is a relevant term and unless supervised/regulated can become a big earner for one/some/all of the staff.

Unless they report all salaries (anonymised) and this would be signed-off by an independent/external auditor (give 20k per year to one of the Big4) we would be somehow certain that there isn't a hockey-stick graph (with the CEO and his wife/husband/son/etc/) getting 70% of the salaries for 3 people versus 30% of the salaries for the 117 people.

In the US salaries for the top dogs at nonprofits is reported.

Some trick this with “consulting fees” to companies controlled by the top dogs, but it sat least something.

> German filings are notoriously opaque vs Europe or UK.

German company filings (for-profit and non-profit) are public at the registry of commerce (Handelsregister) but not easy to parse.

And you can view many of them for free at unternehmensregister.de.

You can read ALL of them for free at the source, handelsregister.de - they stopped charging for access in 2022.

Huh, I didn't know that. But it seems incomplete, at least for Baden-Württemberg. Not sure if that's a bug, an outage, or if they didn't submit all the data. On unternehmensregister.de, you can usually view lots and lots of information, including annual reports (with increasing detail, depending on company size).

As far as I understand it, on unternehmensregister.de, you only have to pay for access to files (including annual reports) of small companies that make use of the § 326 Abs. 2 HGB exception: https://www.buzer.de/326_HGB.htm And maybe for formally authenticated copies? Everything else should be free of charge.

Not sure how fiscality works in Germany, but if similar as France, then that would be 64k _super_ gross per employee per year. So you would remove ~25% of that to get employee gross. Meaning, more like 50k gross per year.

When you say “employee gross”, is this analogous to what we Americans colloquially refer to as “take home pay” eg the final amount you get after all taxes and the like have been removed from your pay? I know it is common in Europe to refer to salary this way but in USA it is rare, salary is usually discussed with taxes still included in the States

Super gross = the total cost of the employee paid by the company

Gross = super gross - employer contributions, usually around 20%

Net = gross - employee contributions, usually around 40%

Most employees, Europe included, talk in gross/year. It can happen that people (usually in the lower bracket) talk in net/month.

In the example above, the cost to the company is expressed in super gross, 64k. That would leave ~50k as gross, so around 30k net, or 2.5k net / month.

Enlightening! Sweden (and perhaps some of the other Nordics) seem to use net/month a lot more than gross/yr (anecdotal observation as an American expat). Everywhere I have chatted with Europeans all seem to talk in post tax numbers however by default.

The unfortunate consequence of this cultural difference is that it makes it harder to compare salaries between the States and Europe.

I think there are two main factors to take into account:

- If you are in a lower tax bracket, the taxes are almost the same for everyone, so talking "net" is okay. If you have a more substantial income though, there starts to be more difference in net amongst people, as it depends on how your compensation is technically paid, and how much it is. So for the same gross, people can end up with different net.

- People tend to think in terms of what is wired to their bank account. For a long time, most (western) European countries did not have "source tax", meaning you would get your gross every month, and are supposed to save up for the income tax coming end of the year. That changed a lot in recent years, and more often now the income tax is directly subtracted from your monthly wages, which may direct people to talk in net.

> The unfortunate consequence of this cultural difference is that it makes it harder to compare salaries between the States and Europe.

I get you, and that's not just because of gros/net, but also just the general cost of living that changes. I lived in a baltic country for a number of years with half the gross I had in western Europe, and felt substantially wealthier.

> the payroll number jumps around between 450 and ~640 - weird, but who knows

Where did you get that data from? The difference might be due to headcount vs. FTE and/or including vs. excluding freelancers.

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