Nine-figure bonus for taking a company public?
Aug 13, 2021
53 Comments
Squarespace CEO received a large bonus (hundreds of millions) for taking our company public.
It’s hidden under “direct listing expenses” if you look closely at our earnings statement for the quarter. The actual listing expenses (paid to the investment banks, market makers, stock exchanges, etc) were only 10% of the total; the other 90% was paid to the CEO.
It was in the form of stock by the way, which (effectively) diluted everyone else, and #squarespace employees are currently pissed. Our stock price has tanked further, after it was released.
I would like to know if this is standard practice? Do CEOs get an extra bonus for taking a company public? Or are we seeing the next Adam Neumann / WeWork here?
#squarespace #ipo #tech
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I am a senior engineer, at the company a little over 4 years, contributed a lot to major projects and incident fixes over the years. My *best* refresher, after nearly 3x appreciation, amounted to less than $3k take home pay.
My fall off from year 4 to 5 will result in 80% reduction of equity compensation, and Squarespace notoriously gives bad raises (~3% for low or average performance, ~5-6% for an outstanding year), so my base has moved up very little by comparison.
WLB is poor due to constant incidents and understaffed on-call rotations. If it wasn’t for how hard leetcode interviews are, I would just leave, and I may still even for a pay cut to a start-up or something because this place is cray.
So to feel like I contributed a lot for years to help make the direct listing possible, and the CEO is getting nine figures while my refresher is worth ~$2500, it is infuriating.
And because we don’t pay well 1. People stay for 2 years and bounce and 2. We’re losing folks to the bigger/better companies that will pay well, which leads to not getting as experienced people.
And we’re told we should be grateful some of us are getting a refresher at all, that I have to wait 4 years for. Our stock price will never beat Shopify’s. Hell, even Wix is 4x ours.
But hey, at least the ceo can cash out big time to buy more houses out in Long Island he’ll get professionally decorated.
For me, SQSP was fun until realizing the job was neither going to help me financially, or move my career forward. I bailed at around 18 months, like most folks I know of.
When I was there years ago, people were frequently leaving for 40%-80%+ comp raises to join companies that were better run, involved much less pointless day-to-day friction, and were actually focused on helping customers -- rather than being obsessed with the minutia of AC's weird personal aesthetic oddities.
I'm not even an engineer, and I've also already gotten hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock & bonus plan refreshers in my first 2 years after leaving SQSP.
I remember, when looking at apartments in NYC, a broker saying, "You can judge how much a landlord respects their tenants by the condition of the property."
Similarly, you can judge how much a CEO actually respects their employees by how much they're willing to actually pay them.
But even the slightest attempts at honest feedback are just shutdown. You’re either giving ++ on Slack to say what a great job people did on the latest multi-day total shutdown of the deployment systems, or you’re The Enemy who will get ignored, disinvited from meetings and frozen out until you leave.