I'm pretty much convinced that the inflection point is "Director" at a FAANG or "VP" at a smaller company. Once you get to that point, it's pretty much impossible to fail downward. Worker bees rise up in level when they succeed (or the economy is good) and fall down in level when they fail (or the economy is bad). But, I've never heard of a Director or VP or anyone from the "executive class" getting a downgrade when moving jobs, regardless of performance and regardless of the economic environment. Once you pass that singularity, it's up, up, and away.
It's more about having the "fuck you" money. Once you reach this level, you typically have about $3-5M in various assets, so you don't have to work in order to keep paying your bills. You may want to work to buy that next supercar or yacht, but you don't have to.
So, if you are out of luck, you postpone that $5M waterfront summer home purchase, go sit on some board for symbolic money, sniff around, and eventually join some hot startup when you and your buddies found another investor cow to milk.
Not having to commit your time to a shitty offer in order to pay your bills right now makes a killing.
Importantly, having fuck you money means you can take outsized risk when you leap. To your point, your tolerance for worker bee work means you're not getting out of bed except for possible home runs. You're not going anywhere you're turning over Jira tickets, you're looking for the next score.
There are many people who reach the director level and then transition careers outside of tech, because they can no longer get hired at that level.
This is especially common during a downturn, when there's less money to go around for people who are "inspiring", but can't "roll up their sleeves" or earn the respect of those who do.
Depending on how long you've been in the industry, it might be because your sample size falls within the anomalous period of 2001-2022. Expect to see a bunch of ex-tech directors opening bakeries, breweries, consulting/"life-coaching" practices, etc.
I don't think I'd call it falling downwards, more like surfing tangentially. It's still a pretty comfortable and fulfilling life, but I wouldn't describe it as up, up & away.
[edit] this is pretty hard to disambiguate from the "fuck you money" types described by a sibling commenter, superficially, but there is a wide distribution of net worths in this group.
There's going to be a whole lot of people who peak with some fancy-sounding title at a no-name company. Then they fade into a vaguely-comfortable (but definitely not rich) obscurity where they can't fully retire — but they sort of drift along with occasional consulting gigs, or writing a niche Substack, or getting really into baking sourdough bread, or some other such nihilistic affectations.
In the grand scheme of things, it still beats having to get a real job.
I think another part of it is that there are many "bootlickers" that will do whatever it takes to keep that director floating, because they think or feel that director will get them promoted, give them a bonus, etc. The moment that director walks in, they are prepared.
I think this is mainly because such people are very career focused (and politically savvy to get to that point) and careful not to take a role that could even signal a step back. That and they typically will have enough financial security that they don't need to rush anything. "Lower level" folks are less likely to have both of these be true.
Andrew Fastow, former CFO of Enron, became a document review clerk after serving his jail sentence. But five years later he became something called a "Principal" for an analytics company called KeenCorp.
I've worked with Surojit; he was an absolute superstar. He rose through the ranks on the basis of mountains of backbreaking and incredibly impactful work.
He also had a terrible reputation of being an arrogant prick. People hated working for him (or so I've been told). I've heard he made grown people cry.
None of that is true, so far as I know. I remember him as kind and considerate. That doesn't mean he wasn't demanding, but he was quite fair, and sensitive to the impact of his words and actions.
He was sr director when he left google first time, so more like 800k+
He was probably making > 1.5M in his second stint at google.
His big break was heading up mobile search ad revenue task force at the time mobile traffic was growing like crazy. Big oppty and he was up to the task.
It's hard to say he really succeeded at flipkart, google shopping, and coinbase. Each of those were 2 year or less stints.
The title of the article is a bit misleading. It implies that he's leaving with a severance package -- that he was let go by the company -- but the $105M is from selling stock from his original employment package and it seems like he's leaving on his own volition.
It's not that misleading. This isn't an early employee who held onto his shares. He joined less than two years ago. He got an insanely high compensation package.
On the bright side, Coinbase launched a lot of high-value new products during the last two years that will help the company thrive and grow in the coming years.
Coinswitch, a crypto-exchange in India is now pivoting to wealth management:
> We have seven new non-crypto products in our 2023 roster, which includes fixed deposits, ETFs [exchange-traded funds], mutual funds, stocks, bonds and U.S. equities.
> The goal is to be the one-stop wealth-tech destination for every Indian. As we diversify into other asset classes, there are different business models we are experimenting with to check which is the best for customers. There are multiple partnerships in place since we are launching such large-scale assets onto our platform. [Editor’s note: CoinSwitch declined to give the names of partners or detail on licenses obtained to sell non-crypto products.]
> We started off with a mission to make money equal for all. Crypto was the starting point for us but we will continue to innovate towards being a wealth tech platform. We see crypto as an investment class that is offered alongside other assets, to help users build a diversified portfolio.
Coinbase Pets: A custody management solution for storing and transferring pet ownership certificates on the blockchain.
Coinbase Recipies: Cooking recipes stores and exchanged on the blockchain.
Coinbase Ponzi: Turnkey service to create, launch and list your new tokens. Whitepaper generated through partnership with ChatGPT. A16Z investment guaranteed.
HN is full of genuinely delusional people who genuinely say these things. It's part of the reason jokes go so poorly here is that some sane people who read them have read identical statements from serious people so it's never clear when something is a joke.
or, someone spending a few seconds skimming comments while doing something else, and adding a question, without spending enough attention to even comprehend that it might have been satire
He got a pretty typical comp package but he happened to get in right before COIN stock took off, which made it astronomical.
It's like the folks who joined Amazon a few years ago as Staff engineers. Their original comp packages were valued at $200k-$300k per year, but then the stock took off, and they ended up with $1M+ per year. They started with a typical package that was stock heavy and got lucky.
Interestingly the people getting in now are getting screwed for the same reason -- with the stock dropping, their comp package is getting cut in half.
I don’t think it makes sense to compare options with RSUs. The former is worthless in a company that doesn’t grow and it’s necessary to stay with the company until IPO. It’s a huge risk. The latter is closer to cash, bubbles notwithstanding.
The people getting in now aren’t screwed, they can just ask for refreshers. But the previous batch certainly got an unexpected windfall.
For a sense of scale; a somewhat representative figure for a lifetime median income of a worker in the US is ~2.5m [1][2] this guy is earning ~50 times that in a couple of years.
To give these figures a bit of shape. This is like getting a smarties cake[3] and giving Surojit Chatterjee pretty much the entire cake for just a couple years work. Whereas the median worker gets, for working a lifetime of effort (~45 years) about a quarter of a single smartie.
I'm not saying that everyone should earn the same but rather I would question this gap which continues to grow. This sort of payout is not aspirational IMHO but rather a symbol of a deeply dysfunctional society.
We need maximum wage laws. Such a law might look like this: The maximum total compensation (Salary + estimated stock grant value) must be less than some multiple of the lowest prorated total compensation of any regularly scheduled employee or contractor operating within nominal geographic limits.
Goal: Stop overpaying top staff or increase the pay of your lowest workers, including commonly outsourced positions such as janitorial staff.
The big issue is stock. It's also one that would be really, really hard to fix because of entrenched interests and wish fulfillment.
To fix it you'd have to do something like break it up into component parts:
1) Voting rights
2) Capital ownership (liquidation rights)
3) Dividend rights (aka profit sharing, pensions plans, and the like)
As well as expand the use of bonds for fundraising (including at the startup funding steps).
It will never happen due to entrenched interests (one of which is very importantly the right of legislators to own shares in companies).
I don't know. It could happen in privately owned corporations, employee owned corporations, or if shareholders of a particular company get mad about the huge payouts to fly-by-night executives. But it's unlikely.
Coinbase' last private round valuation was ~8B[1]. On its DPO day, the stock closed at ~340, giving it a valuation of ~80B, or a 10x increase in ~18 months. Options literally skyrocketed and given the time value of options, they would have been worth far more if traded directly vs a simple exercise and sell. How will you design maximum wage laws in a case where something is shooting up 10-15x in value? Rather, what we have today (progressive taxation) seems to be a right setup with some tuning needed to balance the treatment of capital gains vs wages.
perhaps make max executive pay+benefits proportional to the lowest full-time salary+benefits with a maximum ratio? The spirit of such legislation would be that executives should then seek to increase salaries of their workers in order to then increase their own.
Sure, but when you outsource, you lose efficiency to an extent. Corporations are large because of advantages they get from centralisation resulting in administrative efficiencies and this would be forcing them to undo some of those advantages.
Even worse executives would ex-insource. There are plenty of permatemp agencies that can take employees off of your payroll, while keeping them still working inside your centralized structure. And there are plenty of corporations who have historically given slightly higher level employees a pink slip simultaneous with an on-site consultant contract.
It’s a fallacy that there is a fixed amount of money to go around. Less money for this Coinbase guy doesn’t mean more money for the median worker. If anything, probably the opposite.
Yes, because he got stock as part of his compensation package. Last year it was worth more, but it's still worth a lot. If the product hadn't been successful, it would have been worth nothing. It's not a mystery at all.
> If the product hadn't been successful, it would have been worth nothing. It's not a mystery at all.
The stock is down -84.99% from IPO, seems like so far (accordingly shareholders and the financial market), the product is indeed not very successful because if it was, the price would go up, not down.
So he did a poor job, and now when sold his part of it, he got $105M.
> Should a product officer be judged on whether the economy/financial markets change their mind on the value of risky things like crypto?
Yes, absolutely. The whole point of product management is to find sustainable locations in the product space to create lasting value.
People have been warning for years that the rise of crypto was unsustainable, a grift supported by locating dumb people with dollars to cash out the people who had large supplies of magic beans to sell them.
It's not like FTX was an outlier. FTX was the largest and most spectacular failure so far. But it's part of a rich tradition of crime, grift, and plain old collapse going back at least to Mt Gox in 2014. And it's part of a large network of other failures and soon-to-be failures: https://www.mollywhite.net/etc/ftx-contagion
Ok, bypassing anything regarding the macro-economic situation, how has the Coinbase product (successfully) changed since he was introduced in the company? As far as I know, the only change visible to users is the NFT thing, and we all know how that went.
A more interesting question I have is "why was this chief product officer granted stock worth $100m"? Somebody (one person? multiple people? a large collective group) thought they did a good enough job to grant them whatever they negotiated.
Most comments here are completely missing the point, because they are looking at whether he deserves the money.
One primary goal in a capitalist society is to maximise your own earnings, at whatever level you are playing the game. Most people seem to play this game to some extent (almost certainly if you are involved with a software startup). Most people seem to get very annoyed when someone plays it better than they do. Most natural born Americans are also blind to the fact that they get a massive head start at the capitalism game just from the luck of being born in the USA, which gives a huge number of handicap advantages.
Surojit Chatterjee mentions his background in the blogpost he wrote when he gained the position at Coinbase: “Growing up in India in a poor middle class household”[1]. That cuts out the usual baloney excuse of being born into wealth.
It is just as unfair that the median person in the USA gets to spend $65/day (@2017) while the median person in Mexico gets to spend $10/day[2] ($100M$ is a difference in order, not a difference in kind). I met people in Vietnam working for $50 per month, when a developer in the USA could easily be on $5000 per month, a 100x difference. 33M$ per year is 100x a Google developer at $300k, so we can find examples where the differences are proportional.
We can question whether the rules of the game of capitalism are sensible for society, but there is not much to be gained by saying “not fair” when somebody plays the game extremely well.
He was employed as Chief Product Officer in February 2020, and the Coinbase IPO on April 14 2020.
A capitalist question is: did the VCs receive more than $100M by employing him? IPO valued Coinbase at $99.6bn, so if he managed to increase the IPO price by somewhat more than 0.1%, then the VCs would be in the money, which is all a good wee capitalist really cares about. I would guess him doing his actual job would make zero difference to the IPO (one month is not enough time to develop the product significantly). It would be interesting to know what they were negotiating: the financial incentives they gave him were more “pump-and-dump” rather than work hard to build product. Pump-and-dump may have been aligned with the VC objectives of getting a wildly good IPO (depending on details of non-trading periods etcetera).
> "Most people seem to play this game to some extent"
I'm getting 39% and 55% figures for job-offer negotiations. While that's not the only way people try to maximize earnings, if people leave this on the table it's less likely they're picking something else up off the table.
WRT what else you wrote: Extractive capitalism is one of the reasons for the purchasing power differentials (as well as what's available to purchase) around the world. People can be angry at this sort of thing while still trying to build an adequate lifestyle. And monetary compensation doesn't cover everything, even in a hypercapitalist society.
I've noticed that the most famous people who started out poor tend to be famous for becoming rich. Not all of them, but most of them. Whereas those who were born relatively wealthy tend to become famous for a lot of things.
Most comments here are completely missing the point, because they are looking at whether he deserves the money, and it seems “unfair”. Most of the comments here appear just envious to me. I imagine the majority of us would take a $100M lotto winning and keep it, which is a very similar metaphor from an economic and societal inequality outcome.
It is similarly “unfair” that the median person in the USA gets to spend $65/day (@2017) while the median person in Mexico gets to spend $10/day[2] ($100M$ is a difference in order, not a difference in kind). I met people in Vietnam working for $50 per month, when a developer in the USA could easily be on $5000 per month, a 100x difference. (100M$/3) per year is 100x a Google developer at $300k, so we can find examples where the differences are proportional.
One primary goal in a capitalist society is to maximise your own earnings, at whatever level you are playing the game of capitalism. Most people seem to play this game to some extent (almost certainly if you are involved with a software startup). Most people seem to get very annoyed when someone plays capitalism far better than they do. Most natural born Americans are also conveniently blind to the fact that virtually all Americans get a massive head start at the capitalism game just from the luck of being born in the USA, which gives a huge number of handicap advantages to citizens brought up there.
A good capitalist question is: did the VCs receive more than $100M by employing him? (edit: $600M?) IPO valued Coinbase at $99.6bn, so if he managed to increase the IPO price by somewhat more than 0.1%, then the VCs would be in the money, which is all that good wee venture capitalists should really care about. (Edit: ~0.6% because VCs gave up approximately that much worth of shares at IPO? I would guess the options were not worth $600M: I strongly suspect people making up numbers based on share price and ignoring exercise dates).
He was employed as Chief Product Officer in February 2020, and the Coinbase IPO on April 14 2020. I would guess him doing his actual job would make negligible difference to the IPO (one month is not enough time to develop the product significantly). It would be interesting to know what they were negotiating, given that the IPO process must have been in finalisation stages. The financial incentives they gave him were more pump-and-dump rather than work-hard-to-build-a-product. Pump-and-dump may have been very aligned with the VC objectives of getting a wildly valuable IPO (although it depends on details of non-trading periods, exercise dates, and structure etcetera).
Surojit Chatterjee mentions his background in the blogpost he wrote when he gained the position at Coinbase: “Growing up in India in a poor middle class household”[1]. That cuts out the usual baloney excuse of being born into wealth, and also points out he had the extra serious handicap of not being born into a wealthy country.
Nothing I have written above should be surprising, yet so many of the comments here seem to ignore the facts.
I strongly believe we can and should question whether the rules of the game of capitalism are sensible for society. However I also think there is little to be gained by saying “unfair” when somebody plays the extremely well (certainly wildly better than I) given the hand they were dealt, and the rules (written and unwritten) as they are.
Full time employment is rigged. For everyone. Tech workers are just now waking up to the reality that they are the same disposable peasants like all the rest. Seeing this kind of compensation and thinking .. oh well that guy must have done hell of a job must be some kind of delusion.
Everybody is free to start their own businesses or to get hired as a CPO at a booming startup. I see a lot of people complaining, but not that many actually using those very simple rigged opportunities to make 100M fast.
There are vanishingly small number of these positions in the world, and a vanishingly small percentage of that vanishingly small number are hiring. These positions are also gated by things that commoners do not have access to, like prestigious educational backgrounds and well-connected networks of executives. Same for becoming a founder. Unless you bootstrap, the minute you want to raise funding, you're more often than not going to be blocked by those same gates.
This is a class issue, not a "seize the opportunity" issue.
I understand starting a business, but pulling off the kind of career moves the executive in question pulled off requires a level of grift that most honest people can't really fathom.
It's pure luck most of the time; right time, right place, right connections. It's not usually talent especially in crypto and other legal ponzi schemes
I don't have 100m. I run a small bootstrapped business, and I know for a fact that running a business is a lot of hard work, so I don't share dismissive attitudes in comments.
He was a full-time employee - VP at Google before, and a PM before that... at least $300-500k/year, is that not enough or something? How does one of the highest salaried jobs around make you a 'disposable peasant'? Do you just go through life not knowing anyone on an 'average' income?
From a VC’s point of view startup VPs are disposable peasants too. And to a pension fund, VCs are disposable peasants. As someone choosing which pension fund to invest in, I’m going to chase the best return, so they’re disposable peasants to me and we’ve gone full circle. Of course there’s a name for this: a market. When the pie is growing, it’s not so bad :)
1) Originally giving large amount of stock to the C-suite was seen as a way of locking in the motives of executives to enrich the corporation (or at least bump the share price), not just themselves.
2) They stayed okay with it, and even increased the options, because it was now standard practice. And if they didn't okay it they wouldn't get the 'best' executives.
The problem with all of this is that some shareholders are longer-term holders than others. And if executives are jumping ship to get a higher payout every couple of years, then they are only incentivized to boost the share price for those couple of years (or until their options mature). So executive's motivations are only in sync with the best monetary interests of short-term shareholders.
You'd think the shareholders would design compensation policies to encourage long-term executive retention and thus long-term "shareholder value", but this doesn't seem to be the case.
Berkshire companies don't have outrageous compensation plans. There are plenty of companies that will perform well without the hundred million dollar motivation.
Agreed but...is this just a problem with the US? Does this kindof thing happen in any other country?
And if the answer is "yes, but not just to this degree"...what about relatively speaking? If country X has GDP of Y...is the ratio of executive fleecing that happens in America comparable to any other country?
Not too long ago I was playing the stock market with some spare cash and a trend I noticed was that these companies that lost more money than they were able to generate, all had well-paid executives. So you have a company that reports say a $100M loss one quarter, well it would turn out a sizable chunk of that was executive compensation. I’m not sure how I feel about execs making really any money before they’ve made the company they’re running, profitable.
I propose instituting a 4-day workweek and cutting everyone’s pay by 10-20%. Some will no doubt resign (saving the company money), but the rest will instantly save the company 10-20% in labor costs. If all those studies out there are to be believed, productivity would remain the same or increase (although in those studies pay wasn’t cut along with hours, so… maybe not).
Anyway now seems like a great opportunity for companies to experiment with 4-day workweeks, whether 40 hours (better than nothing) or 32 hours.
A needed dip in the bubble and all of the sudden HN goes from market capitalist to left leaning. This person sold their stock, the time for employees to complain was when he was given this equity a couple of years ago.
Nope. They can also complain now. And forevermore if they want. None of us, you included, is obligated to protect grifters from the criticism of people who suffer while they walk away laughing.
They can complain now but it reeks of jealously instead of actual anger at the “grift.” When conditions were different nobody cares this dude got a ton of equity because they got equity as well.
It might be jealousy. But it also could be that they're just now realizing how they got taken, and to what extent.
Which would be unsurprising, as plenty of startups puff up expectations and take advantage of the young and naive. I have relatively little sympathy for Coinbase employees, as I think the whole thing was a scam built on scams, so it was always a question of who gets screwed. But I have some sympathy for the ones who were early enough in their careers that they didn't really have the chance to learn how rotten the world can get in spots.
You are having the word rational do a lot of work there. also, just because something is rational doesn't mean it's reasonable, which runs entirely contrary to your point. But you didn't realize this because you are not reasonable. You just care what passes the rationality bar. It's much lower.
For sure. There are a lot of people for whom "rational" means "tendentiously argued in a superficially logical way". When in my view the problem is not with their narrowly presented reasoning, but on what they've put outside the frame, which often includes values, assumptions, and data that's available but mysteriously excluded.
Yes, people generally flip views once material conditions change. Also, when the tide goes out, everyone who was swimming naked is revealed. As it turns out, ZIRP was allowing many companies to swim naked.
All the FAANG CEOs are represented besides Sundar Pichai. I looked it up and his compensation was $2M ($6M with stock). Wild that the Amazon CEO got paid over $200M more than him.
not so much the board as Brian Armstrong himself. he seems to have a history of very dubious C-suite hires, including acquihiring Balaji's Earn.com for $100m and constantly talking up his impact when it turned out to be.. a shitty e-learning platform (https://www.coinbase.com/learning-rewards)
(i know i sound negative about all this but if i'm mistaken about Earn please correct me)
Balaji pulled off a heck of a heist himself. Partner at A16Z, spin out some bizarre crypto oil-cooled mining company, pivot like 4-5 times, and then have Coinbase, the company with your VC partners on the board "acquire" your failed startup for 10 figures after it's already burned through over $100M of investor money. These dudes just begging the SEC to get involved in VC deals.
dont take away agency from Brian. by all accounts an excellent founder, enthusiastically supporting Balaji even after Earn was effectively shut down. Brian's vocal support is the one reason I still doubt my own assessment of Earn.
to ya tech minions - slaving every day because some higher up said jira tickets gotta be complete.
dude made more money in two years than you would have made working 10 years at coinbase as an IC.
--also edit
Stock options are a bad way to pay people. Perverse incentives - the holder of stock options doesn't take risk in the way a normal way a stockholder does. a stock option holder isn't there for the long term.
if I had a company - you won't get stock options. you will get decent pay. and loan to buy company stock at public prices
I can’t think of anything CB put out during his tenure that was interesting at all. IIRC, he was a driving the push for Coinbase NFT which flopped massively.
Not sure the exact timeline for these, but what about staking and yields, integration of Coinbase Pro with the main site, and a more robust Tax Center? Those all seemed pretty useful to me. Pretty sure all those were within the last couple of years.
I doubt he voluntarily walked away…the only product he launched, the Coinbase NFT marketplace, flopped and the general crypto slump has also affected the company.
> “As our product leaders have taken on more responsibility, I've been able to consider taking a much-needed personal break to spend more time with my family. It has been a tough year for me personally — my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and my mother passed away unexpectedly. If I'm honest with myself, I don't think I've allowed myself time to grieve either yet,” he wrote in a recent LinkedIn post.
Maybe these people absolutely no heart at all but I'd be a tiny bit surprised if he actually mentioned his mothers death and father getting Alzheimer's as the reason for leaving when in reality he was fired.
If he just said "spend more time with family", then I agree, it sounds like a cop-out. But specifically referring to actual life events? Less likely to be cop-out, at least that's the feeling I get.
Yeah, hard to say. Spending more time with family is a also thing people legitimately do. But especially the bit about "If I'm honest with myself, I don't think I've allowed myself time to grieve either yet," puts it back in the "glib excuse-making" category for me, in that the diagnosis happened sometime in the last year, and he's made his dad's illness about his grieving, not caring for his dad.
What a POS - we had to continue to work while caring for a family member with Alzheimer's, their death, and the death of another family member. I'm sure many of his reports had to continue to work though similar situations.
This guy fails and gets 100+M dollars - never has to work another day in his life, and somehow after all that his break is "much needed"? Really? You need a break from making 1M per year for 3 years with a 100M kicker at the end? You know who needs a break - the 1000 people coinbase fired because Surojit Chatterjee and his C suite cronies wanted to bump their stock price.
It is a valid reason, and I took a leave after my mom died. But I'd rather take a beating than use it as part of a glib, self-serving announcement like this.
It is worth noting that people think differently. tbh, I see no need to assume that Surojit's using his parent's demise as some kind of a narcissistic indulgence to pocket Internet karma.
It seems completely crazy that they'd need to pay him $600m of equity at signing. Like why not close him with a package of (say) $200m? Even if he was making $5m annual TC at Google, that would still be 10x his comp in equity alone.
> It was announced on Jan. 10, 2022 that Coinbase would be slashing its workforce by about 20% (which translates to 950 employees) in an effort to reduce overall operating expenses by 25%.
> This is the second round of layoffs for the crypto exchange, as they laid off 18% of the workforce last June as the crypto winter sets in and the space attempts to recover from the disastrous year.
As someone who has lost his mother unexpectedly last year, and my father suffered from a brain hemorrhage leading to dementia ... and I can very much empathize with the instinct to stop working and take a long break.
Sorry for your losses. I hope you are doing okay and are taking a long break if that's what you desire...but not too long. The world benefits from your software and insights.
HN is so weird when it comes to anything related to crypto.
Guys if you hate “capital”, then maybe stop hanging out on a news website run by and started by a venture capitalists and populated by people who are either participating in or funding startups themselves.
This guy took a compensation package that both he and the company agreed to. He then sold the compensation package.
As far as I see it, that was his employment contract. Good for him. Companies can't retroactively change employment contracts in case of contingencies, and that's very good for all of us.
10b5-1 sales is also the default model for execs who have MNPI.
From the article
> According to the SEC, chief operating officer Emilie Choi booked $106 million in stock sales that same year.
So it's less that they overpaid him and more that all of the exec team other than Armstrong didn't believe in crypto and sold their a chunk options pretty much as they vested
All I can say is, damn, props to him. Tricking the coinbase execs into giving him one of the highest paying packages for any product exec in history and delivering so little value in return is the kind of heist we should all aspire towards.
This philosophy of praising exploitation is actually one of the things I liked least about America and one of the things I found most refreshing when I emigrated. It's pervasive through American society that pulling the wool over the eyes of shadowy entities (large corporations, the government etc...) is a virtue but every time it's done it pulls a lot of money out of the hands of people that could use it more and further concentrates wealth. It's also part of the virtue package that allowed a recent presidential candidate to proudly proclaim that they'd not share their tax returns while talking about how much money they'd fleeced the government for and they were openly praised for these actions while running for the highest office.
Yes coinbase is a pretty shifty entity and probably didn't deserve so much funding in the first place but this individual managing to walk away with such an insane amount of money while making no contribution even approaching this level of value doesn't deserve praise - they're a prime example of the rot that is deeply set in America and causing wealth inequality to spiral out of control.
Generally I agree but this is crypto. Crypto is 100% zero-sum or negative-sum. The whole space is predicated on trying to take money from other participants rather than actually creating value. Creating at best the illusion of value is the goal. This guy nailed it.
It's not like he took $100M from an orphanage or something.
Are people angry at coinbase (and generally crypto exchanges) because they believe that exchanges allow vast amounts of people to speculate on the price of crypto and treat it as an investment vehicle when it was supposed to be a currency? And therefore nobody working for coinbase is capable of creating value.
Or are people angry at crypto overall because it's a wasteful cesspool and so because this guy took a product role in the crypto industry he's not capable of creating any value whatsoever so fuck him and fuck everyone that paid him?
Or are people angry with this guy because he's a bad or underwhelming product leader and the salary does not reflect the value he did bring to coinbase (perhaps you hold coinbase shares)? And therefore you feel he was somehow dishonest about his value and conned coinbase for millions and this reflects poorly on the startup/tech/vc industry?
The only people who should be upset are the those who provided the cash that is going into this person's pockets. Otherwise, I don't have a care in the world about this departure compensation. It impacts me in no way.
If Alex makes $100M selling middle eastern despots tech to track and dismember journalists, Bob makes $100M with his new tech to inject adverts into our dreams, Charlie makes $100M by selling the taxpayer fighter jets that don't work and charging to fix them, Doris makes $100M by offering high-interest payday loans to desperate financially illiterate people, Eric makes $100M getting people addicted to his prescription opioids, Freya makes $100M by buying up property then paying politicians to block new construction, Grace makes $100M by getting a bailout from the government and spending it on exec bonuses, Harry makes $100M by running a for-profit prison that makes sure every inmate re-offends, Iris makes $100M by getting some chump venture capitalists to pay her that, and James makes $100M by persuading rich fools to pay that much for ape NFTs, why shouldn't we celebrate the fact James and Iris's actions are relatively less destructive than the others?
I agree that crypto is 100% negative-sum in my experience. (Especially the ones that are proof of work which literally destroys our one biosphere through wasting electricity.)
Most recently, I got a "legitimate" (doxxed, "real") job offer via HN, got hired and scammed, wasted hours of my time. Crypto is scamsville.
Someone reached out via my Hacker News "who wants to be hired" comment offering a job. We did interviews, I got hired, onboarded and introduced to the team. They missed meetings and then disappeared before the first discussed paydate, ghosting me. They were set up in every way to do this. It seemed to be their standard M.O.
I don't know if "profit" is the right word as it implies customers, but I guess they rip off devs and crypto investors they enter into contracts with then run away from, misappropriating investors' money and not delivering any value. The devs just help make it seem legitimate. There is no actual value creation involved.
A lot (most?) of the public would say that child exploitative imagery is just such a 1-bit issue: we should always come down on it as hard as possible with whatever powers necessary. But a lot of the more libertarian/free-speech type thinkers that are highly represented on HN think that it is not by any means a black and white/1-bit issue, that it’s actually really nuanced.
On the other hand blockchain and Internet ads and seemingly little else routinely get the 1-bit treatment on HN all the time: GP is going grey at the time of writing for saying roughly that crypto hurts orphans.
I don’t understand this, and since my theories about why tend to be pretty polarizing I’ll leave it at: I’m against 1-bit thinking on HN. I’m guilty of it sometimes, but I try not to be.
Edit: Misread GP with apologies. I think the larger point stands.
Would say in all seriousness while nodding at your comment that America was founded on exploitation, not just of natives and Africans but of future waves of immigrants as well, etc, and of the idea of the supremacy of the owner class (within which there was some relative, legally enshrined equality). The history of America is literally one of enabling experimentation and innovation in exploitation, of the framing that there are suckers and subordinates born every minute. This is the case in every single business domain, and is as or more true today as it ever has been. The true equality in America is that anyone and everyone can be cheated and dominated (of course some more easily/painfully than others). This unbroken lineage of inherent danger leads to the rise of (in some cases famous/legendary/mythologized) collectives and movements that attempt to enshrine rights and protections. One does not exist without the other.
As a first-generation immigrant I completely disagree with your framing here and it makes me sad that you view the United States in such an incredibly dismal way. There are many problems here, to be sure, but the US is undoubtedly one of the best places in the world to live, and, like very few other countries, tries to improve on its past, generation after generation.
Forgive me, the intent was not to communicate a dismal attitude. Agree completely that it is one of the best places to live and all the rest.
I personally find the mental model that includes the dynamics of dominance and subjugation along with the responses of solidarity and resistance extremely helpful in understanding the world as a whole. Why are things a certain way etc? Because of X.
It is a physics, and is more completely predictive and reliable than a mental model that sees only oppression and anxiety (as many people are limited to) or one that sees only ambition and advantage (as many peoples' blinders dictate).
Going further, I would argue that the existence of exploitation in a system is in fact essential, as is providing tools to resist and join and brace against it. But eliminating it is impossible and a non-goal.
> America was founded on exploitation, not just of natives and ...
I believe these criticisms are true of essentially everywhere on earth. How much of Germany was French for a time or a vassal state of this one lord or another? Africa, the continent that invented slavery still enslaves people to this day. The Native Americans themselves faught with one another for land and treasure. Going back far enough, we cro magnons stole neanderthal land.
The United States didn't pop into existence in 1776 bringing with it some sort absolute barbarity that previously never existed, it's the other way around, the world was pretty backward and barbaric until the Americans got around to fixing it.
Oh I'm not being sarcastic. The lemmings at the top of most tech companies are highly overpaid and continually fuck up Their One Job. The rare person who manages to trick them into paying a lot for little-to-no services has figured out the game and deserves some praise.
I agree. And often, people don't draw the line at corporations. So many people in America are willing to screw over others if it means another dollar in their pocket.
The base elements of human nature do not care about national borders. I think you'll find such people, in similar proportion, in most places around the world.
"Fucking over others for personal gain" is actually not a "base element of human nature"! Plenty of other cultures are more altruistic, more about raising everyone up.
In the 90s, my relatives first came to the US. In those days, there were newspaper dispensing machines on the sidewalk, which worked like this:
1. It was a box on the sidewalk with a locked swing-out door facing forward.
2. You put coins into the machine and the door unlocks.
3. Inside are all the newspapers. You put your hand in and take only one.
4. You close the door and it locks.
The first thing my relatives asked after seeing this was "why do you only take one?"
If you model society as a Nash equilibrium, the impulse to veer towards social betrayal is present in all people and societies. It's an obvious instinct and the fact that people are so open about indulging it only indicates that we're returning to the historic mean for humans, that the trust required to have a society based on mutual cooperation is vanishing. The only galling thing here is that the people to whom the most social benefits flow -- software engineers, product managers, executives -- are so brazen about betraying it, or cheering the betrayal of others.
I don't know where you emigrated to, but unless it's Saudi Arabia or Singapore, I would doubt your observation. Americans and Euros have a tendency to view everyone else as Rousseau's "noble savage", i.e. a romanticized alien.
I emigrated up to Canada and it certainly is still present here but it isn't nearly as praised. In Vancouver a "starter" home is valued in the millions so wealth inequality is very much present here as well - but there is much more of a social rejection of wealth acquisition through under handed means. Trudeau got into a lot of political trouble over SNC-Lavlin and Doug Ford is currently getting a lot of crap over handouts of park lands to developer buddies. I don't want it to sound like everything is perfect but when people acquire power or wealth through exploitation they actually suffer for it up here instead of it being viewed as a virtue.
On the one hand, I guess you need a certain level of social trust for newspaper dispensing machines to work. On the other hand, there's very little value to be gained by taking 10 newspapers. I suppose you can hawk them on the street for a discount but the benefit is pretty small.
On the third hand, the idea to ask "is more actually better than less" can only occur to people after they've become accustomed to a certain level of prosperity.
I agree with you. I thought GP was sarcasm... but these days who can even tell. Including the people writing/saying... I don't know if this is a USA thing or a more global thing, but I think a lot of people literally don't know if they are being sarcastic or not, sarcasm is so pervasive.
I think it's more of a sarcastic / cynical take - kind of a "you reap what you sow" sentiment. This IS what capitalism is, with a weak social safety net and without controls on the accumulation of stupid levels of capital. If you don't believe that the people who invested in Coinbase should have had the ability to fling around billions of dollars on a whim, then it's difficult to feel bad when they spend it poorly.
Which countries have you lived in? Fleecing large orgs (corporations, the government etc) is seen as a Robin Hood virtue in many if not most countries in the world.
There's lots of very popular religions which have different expectations of moral behavior (in theory). It's also not a particularly pro-social moral framework.
The largest financial crime in the US pretty much every year is wage theft. Wage theft isn't the grand larceny of millions - it's small business owners shaving tens or hundreds of dollars off the paychecks of people who are too powerless to object and accept the mistreatment because it keeps them out of poverty.
This is an issue from the top to the bottom.
We romanticize it when it's punching up (like at a crypto company that's probably been responsible for bankrupting a whole lot of suckers) but accepting it as a virtue also lets all those terrible bosses bask in the glory of how "keen" they're being by shaving off a bit extra for the retirement fund but punching down.
There's two ways to succeed (oversimplification): being conniving and being smart.
In an environment like the USA (where many of the world's smartest tend to flock and extreme wealth is relatively achievable), being conniving is rarer than being smart, so that's what people value.
I hope rarity is not your only marker for value. Otherwise I do have a rag to sell you which I've been using for 5 years now. Totally unique, nothing else like that.
It's not what I value, it's an observation of what others value. I know people couch their own opinions in the views of others a lot, but nowhere did I express personal feelings.
It was just trying to dig one layer deeper to contextualize the situation OP was talking about (Americans valorizing confidence games).
- The world of Competition: Domination by action until one reaches a point of coldness that one loses oneself creating a "dark night of the soul" bringing change
- The world of Love: All efforts are aligned to create well being by avoiding harm of oneself and others.
If you are in the world of Competition, you will see the world in terms of black and white, gain and loss. Even my statement will be seen as a fool's position. One has to make a living in the world, even at the expense of others.
If you are in the world of Love, you will see the service you provide to others is an asset and you don't have to think about "Making it in the world", harming others at you own benefit because the world provides for you exactly what you need and you some how escape all of the consequences of others you have chosen the path of competition.
Which ever side you choose, will be the world you create for yourself and others. Right now the world of competition dominates, but it won't always be that way. Eventually we will all come-around, to love :D
Natural laws are neither cruel or kind. The are absolutely just. The cruelty of [competition] is a passing phase of evolution. - James Allen "The Competitive Laws & The Law Of Love"
Yep, the better comparison would be a % of Coinbase's market cap which is $11B. Still, as far as I know, walking away with 1% of your company's market cap is rare for a non-founder hired only 2 years prior.
Yea don't hold me for the rigor of my statement, it was just a comparison of magnitude.
You're right that they've already passed the bag to investors, possibly a lot of that to retail - they can all still have a nice "fuck you" dinner in their honor!
I have to say... there's something kind of demoralizing about this and some of the other shenanigans happening right now.
I'm part of a local YIMBY group advocating for more housing and you see some really rough stories about people who are employed, work hard, and still can't put a roof over their heads. And then you see stuff like this.
> Tricking the coinbase execs into giving him one of the highest paying packages for any product exec in history
The money was primarily generated from stock and options sales, not salary. If anything, it would be institutional investors who financed this. The fact that he happened to be on a Rule 10b5-1 plan further cements this; he didn't even control the timing of the sales.
What I mean to say is that compensation is typically negotiated as a _number of shares_, not as a dollar value. The fact that outside investors wanted to pay a surprisingly high amount for those shares is on them.
If your company says "we're going to pay you $400,000 and a commemorative water bottle", it's hardly fleecing the company if someone else wants to pay $40M for the water bottle.
Fair point. I am generally opposed to crime, legal and otherwise. But stealing from the grifters not only has a certain moral justice to it, it might even be a net social positive.
That did cross my mind! But what makes Omar different is that he understood his place in the world and was honest about it. Both with himself and with the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3i36ybA8Ms
Omar is a fictional character, but I would like to believe if he had managed to acquire far far more than he needed for a basically comfortable lifestyle, he would have shared a lot of it.
Maybe, and this might be a controversial take, nobody should be paid $105 million - because maybe nobody is actually generating that much value on their own.
This is like saying banks should not manage risk. I am sure that if you put your bucks in a bank account you want to seem them there when you check your balances otherwise you know who you will be blaming.
Also, ask CEOs and Chief Risk Officers from financial institutions if they worry about evaporations. I am not surprised though about him walking away with the money and your comment in the crypto world.
Coinbase didn’t do enough to thwart the massive fraud and youtube-deepfake-powered-heists going on. Lots of sheep lost lots of money and look where we are now. The crypto winter will last 50 years.
Coinbase is not a scam - the service they provide is the buying and selling of cryptocurrency which they do just fine. I don't like crypto either but calling everything related to it a scam is just intellectually lazy.
I think that's the best place to prevent collapse. They were industry leaders, for some time at least. They funded a bunch of things which turned out to be scams, biggest one being FTX. If internet collapses, I think google will be a bit to blame, no?
I mean...we've seen these massive boom and bust cycles over and over again. So yeah I do sort of expect the Chief Product Officer to have some clue how to handle them. It's not like it was out of the blue.
parent comment said "not good at the moment" so just responding to "at the moment" its actually not as bad as the haters would imagine (e.g. its well above the 2020-era ceiling of $16k despite much tighter monetary policy and crypto institutions failing all over the place)
I meant like crypto as a whole. The 2020 shininess has worn off. NFTs are all dead. Web3 is being forgotten. The main news stories are about fraud and hacks.
From a quick glance at their financials, they lost about a billion dollars in the past year but still have $7 billion in working capital. I think they'll be fine.
I've been hit up by cryptobro's on LinkedIn more in that last month than at anytime previous. Clearly the ponzi scheme needs more victims to keep the pyramid intact...
I've defended crypto in the past but its increasingly clear that this is all basically academic BS, but with a financial component. Theoretically, its nice to have a "digital gold" alternative to store your wealth away from authoritarian governments. But most of crypto thrives in countries with strong democratic traditions and no history of extended and widespread government overreach.
All the other aspects of crypto - DeFi, NFTs, GameFi - are nice for making money but no one asked for them, and no one realy needs them.
They're fun to use and fun to gamble and play around with, but its all...useless. Especially for the existing users. DeFi, in its current form, isn't "banking the unbanked" - its just a place for the world's 1% to screw around on.
I understand the promise, but I also think the product is far, far from what the world needs or even wants.
These comments don’t really address opportunity costs. It’s the same concept where why are we paying non profit CEOs so much but when you think about it those CEOs could have just worked for a much higher salary anywhere else .
That's a fallacy, those CEO's wouldn't be elsewhere making more, otherwise they would. That's just a trick they use to convince people of supporting with (in most cases tax free donations) their ridiculous life style. Another reason I prefer donating directly to people who need it, or volunteering. A person who is making 3M/year in an organization, is not the "sacrifice myself for the people"
type, let's stop fouling ourselves.
And anyone with a "foundation" (recall sarah palin's daughter getting paid some ridiculous amount for her :foundation" to fight teen-pregnancy after been a pregnant teen??
Fwiw I would trust a person who has gone through teen pregnancy to understand what kind problems it has. Just like people who didn't get to go to good schools establish scholarships. In isolation, those are the people who will understand the issue much more.
Yeah. I didn't know that detailed, but I indeed suspected it. That's why I said "in isolation". These people will be scammers regardless of what they are doing. I was just being a bit pedantic because your wording suggested teen mom's should not run charities for teenage pregnancy related things.
By "so little value" are you saying that whatshisface was/is a bad product leader or are you saying that it's impossible for anything to be valuable when it's crypto-adjacent?
Coinbase seems to have from the very beginning overindexed on "resume" hires and not people who actually care about crypto eg Ivy League/Google/TradFi hires.
Not sure what you mean. Feel free to look at the background of all the big hires they've made. It's lots of Ivy League/Google/LinkedIn/Banking/Consulting people.
Yeah but how do you know those were not crypto enthu people? I've seen crypto enthusiasts in all walks of society. I thought there was more detail to what you were saying.
Doesn't sound like any trickery was involved. Relatively standard high profile options package. He got really, really, really lucky in terms of timing and mechanics.
Coinbase is down 88% from all time highs, and slightly less from its IPO. Coinbase has an $11.6b market cap which means he extracted a little under 1% of the entire company’s value in two years.
Yes but if you look at the balance sheet they have about 6 billion in net assets (assets minus liabilities) so the value of the company itself is really more like 5.6 billion. This is a little tricky because company valuation in many cases is a combination of the value of owned assets and the expected value of the actual operations of the company.
So he really extracted more like 2% of the value of the operations of company itself.
> What makes you say the value of their contribution is minor?
Excluding the stock performance entirely, they've released no particularly successful or even interesting products under his tenure.
He comes from Google where he worked on ads and shopping, so honestly that tracks pretty well. Google (not Alphabet) hasn't done anything interesting or innovative in a long time now either.
I'm surprised anyone thinks this might not be intended seriously. It's a pretty common sentiment among the working class. Stole from the little people? You suck. Ripped off the owning class? Nice job, please do more of that.
It is common to everyone. Proof: wage theft is about $1 Billion a year. https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021/
The post is interesting that someone actually working got money out of a company.
It's simply turnabout. The owning class regularly, illegally, rips off the working class and gets away with it because it's so difficult to prove in courts.
It’s not even about stealing. With 100m I would have the resources to found multiple companies that could fix real problems and provide good paying jobs.
Why does having a contract eliminate the possibility of getting ripped off? Tons of places commonly associated with ripping people off use contracts to do it. Car lots, telcos. Banks.
If I were to formalize my colloquial understanding of the phrase "ripped off" it would be something like: a transaction took place between two parties where upon evaluation of the results of the transaction after-the-fact revealed that the overall expectations were not met by one party and had the offended party known fully how the transaction was going to play out, the either would not have entered into it or would have only entered into it for a drastically different amount of money.
This morning, I went to a bakery and ordered a blueberry muffin. It was fresh and moist and delicious. I was satisfied. If it had instead cost the same money but been dry and crumbly and had a taste of old socks, I would have considered myself to have been "ripped off". But I put no thought into the transaction, I had a wide range of acceptable outcomes, and I did almost no due diligence beforehand to ensure I was going to get the expected result.
So now, you ask:
> Why does having a contract eliminate the possibility of getting ripped off?
If transactions exist along an possibility-for-ripoff spectrum from "ordering a blueberry muffin for breakfast" to "hiring a C-level exec for X years for $YYY,YYY,YYY", then the closer you get to the latter transaction, the more specific the contract should be about expectations.
Every step along the way to having a signed contract normally involves an increased awareness of expectations by both parties. That's what the contract is. And the moment of signing a contract is an intentional decision to move forward with the transaction as specified. It's certainly possible to subvert the normal process in such a way that you obfuscate your intentions, but even then, the results of your intentions must show up in the contract language itself, or they won't count. Unless someone is holding a gun to your head, or you're not intellectually capable of entering a contractual relationship, the moment of signing your name to a contract is a moment where you are affirming that you aren't being "ripped off", that you've considered the terms and are willingly agreeing to abide by them.
Perhaps it's still possible to do all that and consider yourself to have been ripped off. And perhaps your examples are good examples of such cases. But if your board or C-level executives sign a contract for employment of a high-level executive which includes a 9-figure deal for compensation and they don't have more awareness than a poor person going to a car lot, they didn't get "ripped off", they're ripping off the investors or shareholders by collecting whatever salary they're collecting.
IANAL, also not a C-level exec, also not particularly smart about how crypto "works", but this all seems like fairly obvious stuff.
Ripping off, literally, is theft. In the legal contexts you're talking about, it's used as a hyperbolic metaphor. Those are distinct meanings. Arguing about it is pointless.
I bet I see or hear "ripoff" and derivatives used to describe what turned out to be a shitty deal, about 100x more often than I see or hear it used to mean "stealing".
[EDIT] But perhaps it connotes differently outside American English? That could be.
Crypto companies were starving for talent, eager to pull people in from the "Web 2.0" world with lavish salaries. He recognized their desperation and negotiated a gigantic executive comp package. Also accurately sized-up Brian Armstrong as a lightweight who will eagerly sign-on anyone who strokes his ego.
His major accomplishment was the Coinbase NFT marketplace and then checked out. He spent all of 2022 doing god-tier quiet-quitting.
He's not the only one whose done this: Balaji Srinivasan got hired on and did something similar with Coinbase's learning platform. Massive comp packages for executives doing C- work and still collecting atta-boys from the CEO. That guy used shareholder money to shitpost on twitter and build his personal brand.
This is like the opposite of hustle. Don't you think you are supporting getting massive compensation for essentially being bad at your job? Do you think it's ok because it happens to a large corporation? I can understand feeling happy at the big corporation's misery but respect isn't what is owed to this dude.
Edit: Another thing, at least some of that shareholder money came from retail investors. Even if it's 1% it's still over a million dollars scammed from just the normal people.
These executive salaries ara usually shareholder's money (like the whole business), and the problem is that shareholders are often too distributed and don't have enough control to do anything about it.
> the problem is that shareholders are often too distributed and don't have enough control to do anything about it
Any examples to cite? Because I can't think of an example of a single company where this is true.
Usually it's a small group of shareholders that hold more than 50% of the company, making it essentially theirs as they hold a winning number of votes. They run it in a way that benefits them, placing their people on the Board of Directors, setting their goals, which the C's just follow. Sure the C's get paid well, but that's negotiated with the Board (who represents the majority shareholders).
I'll concede that sometimes, when the majority shareholder is also in the C-suite, you see more blatant "take from the company and give to myself" behavior. But as the majority shareholder it's effectively their company, and they can do what they want with what they own (basic freedoms I think we all agree on?). For example, Elon, as majority shareholder, could simply liquidate Tesla and pocket his share of the sale. It's his company.
Poorly run companies usually have a poor Board of Directors. This usually happens when the majority shareholders are short sighted and prioritize short term profit over long term growth.
I've seen situations where the company/board claws back money after a C leaves, because the C was negligent/dishonest in their doings.
In all of the above cases, the shareholders are the one's holding the cards. I can't think of a single case where the board conspired with the C's to fleece the shareholders. To do so would likely result in criminal charges.
>But as the majority shareholder it's effectively their company, and they can do what they want with what they own (basic freedoms I think we all agree on?). For example, Elon, as majority shareholder, could simply liquidate Tesla and pocket his share of the sale. It's his company.
Yeah, but minority investors know that going in. If I buy 10 shares of Google, it's unrealistic for me to think that I hold any power as a shareholder. I'm simply along for the ride.
A large investor buying say, a 25% stake in a company, while being aware of an existing 51% voting block, knows that their 25% position is a minority and does not come with significant influence.
Any investor who buys a large minority stake and later complains about not having control didn't do their homework ahead of time.
If a minority shareholder doesn't like the way the company is run they have three choices:
- sell their shares and buy-in to a more attractive company
- buy up a controlling interest and get their voice heard
- shut their mouth and deal with it
Why should the minority opinion be allowed to overrule the majority? The majority has more skin in the game, they have more money at stake in the company.
Controlling shareholders have a fiduciary duty to deal with minority owners in a fair, just, and equitable manner and they may not use their power to control corporate activities to benefit themselves alone or in a manner detrimental to the minority.
And how much is the average employee making? Honestly I'm down for making a law that says in order to pay execs more, they have to pay their workers more.
Even at a 50 to 1 ratio of worker to exec, they can still make more money but increase the wealth of the workers at the same time.
BS in CS at Kharagput, something like a US T2 university
MS in CS at Buffalo, something like a T2 univeristy,
Spend some years at IBM and Oracle as a developer/senior developer 200k/year ?
MIT Sloan MBA T1 world class
PM/Senior PM at Symantec for a year 200-300k/year?
Head of Payment products India at Google, 8 years rising though the ranks 300-500k/year?, did an externship of 2 years at flipkart as SVP
Then back to google as a VP 500-1.5MM/year?
CPO at coinbase made 150 million.
It looks like he moved around, leveraging his title to get senior roles between start-up and well-established companies:
PM at small company to PM at big company,
Head of product at big company to SVP at startup
SVP at startup to VP at big company
VP of big company to C-suite at startup pre-IPO
Most of all, he got in on the crypto gravy train right in time for his options to balloon