My understanding is that the underwriting bank and early investors and institutional investors win first, then founders, after that early employees. Usually offloaded onto the robinhood crowd who excitedly buys in.
My understanding is that the underwriting bank and early investors and institutional investors win first, then founders, after that early employees. Usually offloaded onto the robinhood crowd who excitedly buys in.
According to this analysis of Anthropic's S-1, the founders own about 10% of the company, which at $2T valuation would mean they each make about $28B. The employees collectively own about 15% which results in some staggering math - thousands of employees making ~$100M each, even those hired as recently as last year.
These are averages, but still!
https://x.com/AndrewBenson/status/2115458726396310008
Jesus. Why doesnt every man, woman, dog, chat and child work at Anthropic right now?
I was on my way but the train broke down again!!
Because if we did, we'd each get about 1000 bucks.
You do understand how individual slices decrease in size as you divide the pie more ways, right...?
That’s a rather astounding amount of cash to have extracted per capita.
It truly is. And, looked at that way, it is an indictment of the systems that allow this, and yet another piece of incontrovertible evidence that we need to change those systems to bring money, and power, back from the ultra-mega-wealthy to the populace at large.
It just, y'know, isn't a good argument for having everyone work for Anthropic ^_^
Don't we, though?
Yeah - maybe we get a free token on IPO day.
In contrast, back when RedHat went public they reached out to everyone on the open source mailing lists, and gave everyone a few shares as thanks for the work they were benefiting from. I got some shares even though all I had done was post some free video format converters.
Employee shares usually get put in a 3-6 month lockdown so they don't get to participate in the bubbly robinhood excitement.
It's also often also part of the employee retention plan. If you discover your boss has lied to you shortly after an IPO or a merger, then odds are good they were trying to hold onto you by any means necessary until their bonus was paid out.
I've had several people I trusted destroy our relationship this way over the years.
The s1 lays out the exact schedule and let me tell you it is not a normal schedule. Is that a surprise anymore though?
Oh wow, I looked it up. Employee's get to sell up to 10% on day 1. That's cool for them.