[busterarm]

Your series A startup continues to operate and offers a severance that isn't even required for the purposes of reputation management.

They want to be able to hire good people tomorrow so they pay you severance today.

The company in question here is dead. There is no more money coming in and no business to operate.

[omginternets]

I understand what you're saying, but I think you may be missing my point, which is: Jeff Bezos's reputation is damaged by this. I will not work for anything he touches because I don't think he's behaving decently.

[busterarm]

So he already put up and risked his personal money to even start this venture and it failed and you're saying he should continue to lose money on a failed investment even though these people will receive unemployment insurance that his business already paid tax into to fund?

Startups are risky and even though you work at one, I don't think they're for you. There's plenty of other union labor jobs with pensions out there that seem to be more your speed. Your position isn't a reasonable one.

You want to have your cake and eat it to. All the rewards of being an early stage startup employee without any of the risk or skin in the game.

[Larrikin]

Why is it a requirement to have "skin in the game"? What does that even mean?

The risk to an employee at a company that got $250 million should only be accepting options that could be worthless in lieu of a portion of salary. There absolutely does not need to be any risk of losing healthcare, lacking severance, or any other loss of benefits. Founders want you to believe this but it doesn't have to be true.

[busterarm]

The risk of joining a venture backed startup is that no new money comes in and there is no exit and you are out of business in a matter of weeks, like what happened here.

This is constantly looming over your head and used to be something understood by startup employees before the era of zero interest free money and "startups are kewl".

Any money raised got spent, otherwise they didn't need to raise it.

The trade off to take on the risk of being underpaid and possibly soon-to-be-unemployed by a startup are the potential equity payoff, the work environment and the human-networking. And it's usually worth it because you're buoyed by the local startup community and the high chance you get another job with people you know tomorrow if things don't work out.

The problem here is that our industry is flooded with the types of people who would otherwise have become lawyers or finance people because they chase comfort and status as opposed to a desire to work on cool shit with cool people. It kind of makes me hope these conditions extend for a while to weed out the people who don't belong and we can get things back to relatively-normal.

[Larrikin]

You keep insisting that a startup operating out of a garage with employees that all know each other requires the same risk profile as an at peak 1500 employee company with a quarter of a billion dollars in funding.

The only people who insist this must be true are founders that want to unload as much of the risk on their investors and employees as possible so that they themselves carry little to "skin in the game"

[busterarm]

If you're operating in the red and funding pools dry up, there is no difference. That's the point.

The only things that matter are cash on hand, burn rate and your ability to raise new money. Convoy's cash on hand was tiny, its burn rate was enormous and its ability to fundraise was zero.

[fargle]

what that "skin in the game" means is that you are participating and take on some of the risk.

"why it is a requirement" has nothing to do with the law, the whims of "the founders", etc.

why it is a requirement is an economic truth - if there are enough players that believe that a gamble on working for an early stage startup is worth taking on some substantial, but perhaps not ruinous, risk, then that sets the bar.

> Founders want you to believe this but it doesn't have to be true.

Whether that is true, or "has to be true" depends only on the market. It certainly seems that it was true very true and probably still is. But neither you, the law, nor the founders have any control over whether it is worth it at the moment in your situation.

[omginternets]

>Startups are risky and even though you work at one, I don't think they're for you.

Fortunately, there are many startups whose leadership is prosocial enough to try to offset some of the risk to its employees.

Since you seem like a Chicago School kinda guy, I'll put it in terms I think you can understand: employment is a market, and I am fortunate enough to have a optionality. It's bizarre that you fail to recognize that; it's pretty critical to your own analysis.

[busterarm]

Fortunately most employers are waking up to the fact that they don't want to hire the types of employees who are prone to put a gun to their head.

They're shitty coworkers too.

[omginternets]

Are you implying that I am one of them? When exactly have I held a gun to anyone's head?

I just picked my best option in an open market...

[compiler-guy]

That's an odd way to describe "negotiating the best deal they can find."

[busterarm]

People who think that a rich investor who puts up some seed money to start a new venture should chase a bad investment with more of their personal funds to make sure employees are taken care of after the business fails (even though they paid into unemployment insurance, which already does that)...and they believe this so strongly that they would never work for any company that investor is associated with, regardless of the opportunity, are who I'm talking about.

These are the same types of people who think tech workers are treated so poorly that they need to unionize and should be free to spend their work time doing political things that have no contribution to the company bottom line.

It has nothing to do with negotiating the best deal for yourself. Severance is voluntary and is rarely negotiated up front. Especially at the level of employment for the 99% we're talking about where the company going out of business really matters -- negotiating severance up front is like negotiating a prenup. It's requires leverage and people in these income brackets don't have it.

[omginternets]

It's beyond odd. If we take him at his word, it follows that only the likes of Bezos are allowed to benefit from an open job market. I am at a loss for what the parent post is even trying to say.

[umeshunni]

What does Jeff Bezos have to do with Convoy?

[sokoloff]

He's an investor in it. So basically, not much.