[jasode]

>Many companies are able to get the perks, culture, and autonomy right without being a multi-billion dollar company.

You're right but I understood what Periodic intended to explain. Unfortunately, he phrased it as "billions in ad revenue" instead of a less common metric of "profit-per-employee".

If the company generates enough profit-per-employee, it can afford to pay for lavish perks.

Consider 2 different companies' revenue,income,#employees:

Walmart: $482b, $24b, #2300000 -- ~$10k per employee

Google: $74b, $19b, # 69952 -- ~$276k per employee

Take one example of a perk such as free catered food which is estimated to cost $20-per-employee-per-day.[1] For Walmart to offer this perk multiplied by 2.3 million employees, it would cost ~$11 billion which is almost half the $24b profit. Google's calculation for 69k employees is ~$349 million which is less than 2% of the profit. And the free food is just one perk... there are also massages, haircuts, laundry, daycare, etc.

Yes you don't have to have a billion in revenue to offer perks like that. SAS Institute of North Carolina in the 1990s didn't yet reach $1 billion in revenue but they offered lavish Silicon Valley style perks.[2] They could afford it because they sold statistics software with high margins (profits). Although they are a private company, we can safely assume they are generating much more profit per employee than Walmart.

So, if we have a hypothetical medium-sized company that has a revenue of $400 million with income of $100m ... to afford lavish perks, we need to generate that $100m with ~360 employees or fewer (Google benchmark). If it requires hiring 9500 employees to generate $100m (Walmart benchmark), it means we will have to pinch pennies and charge the employees for each pen taken from the supply room.

Direction of cause-effect: create a great high-margin business so you pay for free gourmet food.

Attempting the reverse of subsidizing $20 for each employee doesn't mean you'll end up with a high-margin business.

We can generalize the free food case study to other "Google perks/methodologies/culture" to see if we really have the direction of cause & effect correct.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/4/googles-ginormous-food...

[2] 60 Minutes story (2002): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvsIcwHavOs

[muninn_]

So I understand what you're saying here, and it makes sense. At the same time, I see career section after career section offering the same kind of perks with much smaller companies. Maybe it's not 3 meals of gourmet food, but free catered lunches, great 401k matching, unlimited vacation, great health and dental benefits. I'm not saying the perks are matched tit-for-tat, but I still stand by my statement that you don't have to be a multi-billion dollar company to afford those perks.

Likewise, Walmart can offer those types of perks. Just not to people working on the floor or in distribution centers.

Thanks for your original reply :)

[e15ctr0n]

> I see career section after career section offering the same kind of perks with much smaller companies. [...] you don't have to be a multi-billion dollar company to afford those perks.

Many of these smaller companies are VC-funded startups that have zero revenue and are burning VC money to provide these perks.

[ghaff]

These are by no means the norm outside of Silicon Valley VC funded companies where they have become table stakes. Good health and dental in many cases but not the rest. And unlimited vacation, where offered is, even ignoring the more cynical interpretations mostly about eliminating liabilities especially under California law.

[morgante]

I'm guessing you're mostly looking at career sections for technology companies. In general, tech companies have quite high revenue per employee.

You're probably also looking at startups, which don't yet have material revenue but plan to reach margins closer to Google's than Walmart's.

[brazzledazzle]

It's not fair to count retail or warehouse employees. Walmart would only need to offer those perks to its corporate employees.