[ska]

> On top of that comes often quite substantial requirements to buy into the fund for at least senior staff

This is a clearly beneficial requirement, but your point is fair about it leading to 'on-paper' comp looking high. But I'd even go so far as to say that the majority of comp for senior people should be contingent (not sure if that's typical).

[vidarh]

Yes, but it's tricky here because often it's upfront. The only reason it wasn't our case was that carry was unusually spread out over the team and the buying requirement was for everyone, so the LPs accepted that as long as there was a clear plan in place for everyone to buy in, it was ok.

Note that given salary levels this means that over the 10 year runtime of the fund, most of us would be giving up nearly ~20% of our 10 year aggregate gross salary, most of us within 4-5 years. My gross salary during that period was not much different from in my job before - it was a pretty steep sacrifice for a shot at that carry.

[ska]

> Yes, but it's tricky here because often it's upfront.

Fair. These sorts of things are usually pretty nuanced.

> it was a pretty steep sacrifice for a shot at that carry.

I totally get that, but it also seems like the ideal balance of interests. To many obvious failure modes if you don't have enough skin in the game. Of course that works the other way too, the upside in good-to-great cases have to make it make sense.

[vidarh]

I mean, I made the choice to join because I saw it as a good option. But even so, was an unusually risky tradeoff between an effectively low basic for a higher bet at the return. I also certainly think it's understandable that LPs want it that way. Main point is that it's only lucrative if the fund pays out on carry, and you take a high risk for something which might possibly pay out ten years in the future. If it doesn't pay out, you've worked years at a not very high (for tech) salary.

[ska]

Which is effectively like old school startups when you think of it … relatively low salaries and a bunch of options that may or may not turn to gold in 10 years .

[vidarh]

Sure, and that's fair enough as long as staff gets a big enough stake. And to be clear, we did. Every single person outside the exec team/general partners on that team had an unusually high stake in the total carry. Our main investor buying us out and turning it into a boring corporate not being the end game we had in mind aside, it was one of the most enjoyable startup experiences I've had (we were a bit of a hybrid, in that while we were operating a single fund, a lot of my work was towards getting tech in place to optimize delivery of subsequent funds).

A lot of startups think it's still ok to pay under the odds once hiring staff that are getting tiny fractions of a percent, though, and at that point, the risk-adjusted value of those options is not worth taking a cut for relative to a bigger corporate with somewhat predictable share performance and liquidity.

[ska]

We’re on the same page it sounds like.