[bgxor]

In this "growth above all else" ecosystem, do you think profit sharing could possibly be just as bad? I'm not sure how those deals are usually set up, but unless you set aside a portion of revenue to share I could see people losing out here too.

Do you know of good examples of this working? I'm interested in how it might work with a typical startup.

[mpdehaan2]

I don't know of any examples, it just seems like it would be a good way to structure things. I also can't see it being bad if it did not differentiate by position - I've heard a lot about how much, say, enterprise sales pays itself (because effectively it sees the money first and controls who sees the money) and I'd be very wanting to make sure everyone - admin assistants, everyone, who made the organization great had a chance.

I think you would want to calculate a % early in the year, and then award that percentage at the end of the year.

If you wanted to taper that somewhat by employee reviews I guess you could, but it shouldn't be on quota - and ideally you'd just not continue to employ those people you didn't want to be there.

Yes, everybody would lose out if there were no profits. And a lot of startups aren't profitable. But (IMHO) I think that's also where SV investment gets it wrong -- they value growth above profitability sometimes, and this desire for rapid scaling makes or breaks companies, when in the end, I think a greater percentage could be BOTH happy and moderately successful at the same time, rather trying to bust themselves and "go big or go home".

This model is probably a LOT easier to adopt in a bootstrapped company, where there's less likely a board to say no to it -- and yeah, if you're not profitable, you wouldn't do it... and you also would be unlikely to have stock anyway.