Comment by maxxxxx
9 years ago
He could start with his companies giving out a much larger share of equity to their employees. I always find it fascinating when VCs advocate for things like UBI or this American Equity plan while at the same time being a major contributor to income equality. They could do a lot right now bit instead they make some vague proposals while keeping their money.
This is generally what I see as a better solution to a UBI; the silicon valley/start-up model of giving employees equity in the company and a wage. Just extend this to every hire (not just engineers) and at all stages of the company (not just start-ups).
A UBI is just a round about way of distributing the wealth generated by automation when the real fix should be having broader societal ownership of those productive assets.
"Now that I'm rich you people should do _________."
Not sure if you read this essay, but Sam advocates for startups to be significantly more generous on employee equity: https://blog.samaltman.com/employee-equity
(at least compared to other VCs, you may still disagree with his absolute numbers)
He could actually implement these ideas if he was serious.
YC is a competitive accelerator that gives you a small seed investment in exchange for a few things, but mostly for the expert advice. On this topic, the advice to companies is to be generous with equity. What else should be done?
This proposal seems like the equivalent of a failing startup diluting the crap out of its employee pool to raise a gigantic round.
> This proposal seems like the equivalent of a failing startup diluting the crap out of its employee pool to raise a gigantic round.
If that's possible, that's probably the right thing to do; if the company is failing, who cares about diluted stock? 0.0075% of $0 is still $0.
Well, that’s the point of schemes like UBI. Pay people off to avoid any sort of fundamental change in ownership or control.