[velcrovan]

Some Business 101 for you: Salaries are separate from profits. Salaries are a cost to the business just like rent and hosting costs. Profits come after all the costs. (Salaries are also taxed as personal income just like at any other business.)

The $5m over 6 years is $833k in revenue per year. Not a lot, and salaries/benefits probably take up the biggest part of that, leaving very little profit. Which is the way it should be everywhere in my opinion.

I applied to work at Ghost a while back and still would love to work for them. Not only do they get salaries, they have amazing benefits (by US standards). Being a non-profit means two things: a) profits are reinvested in the business rather than distributed to owners, and b) Ghost isn’t, and can never be, an acquisition target by other companies or investors. That kind of stability is a huge appeal for me, both as a user and a worker.

[akerl_]

I feel like this comment would be totally complete without the first 5 words, which serve to make it condescending.

Part of the goal of this community is for its participants to learn things they don’t know; the tone implied by the intro to your comment makes it seem offensive that somebody wouldn’t realize US non-profit status still allows for salaries and benefits for their staff.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

[Aeolun]

I think that to a point this is caused by the attitude in OP’s own comments. While it would be nice if it was possible to completely ignore it, I don’t think that’s realistically possible.

[akerl_]

Perhaps I’m overly optimistic. I’m also optimistic enough to believe that the comment I responded to wasn’t aiming to be condescending; the phrasing was the kind of thing that could very well have sounded jovial in speech among friends. I tend to think that’s the more common failing here: people type the way they’d speak if they were having a chat at the pub after work, and a lot of nuance burns off in the speech-to-text conversion.

In any case, the site guidelines ask us to counteract this by assuming good faith, and responding to the strongest interpretation: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[velcrovan]

Point taken.