I usually make a few different offers that have cash / token allocation tradeoffs. Higher token = lower cash, and lower cash makes you more like a founder.
Just to give a concrete example, for a recent very good candidate, the offer on the high token side was ~20% of the expect total allocation and 150k cash. There is also a higher cash option with lower token allocation.
For less exceptional candidates, the offers are a lower token allocation the equivalent cash.
> I've noticed that recruiters recently will use euphemisms for crypto/blockchain/etc
I've seen this also, and I think its lame.
This is why at Fetchfox I explicitly use the phrase "crypto token" in the article and in all offers offers to prospective hires. It's a crypto token, so we call it that.
There are a lot of negative associations with the term, but using euphemisms just confuses people and makes it seem like you're afraid or that you're trying to trick them. I say, call a spade a spade, and call Voldemort "Voldemort".
> Why does no one run a completely employee owned tech company?
I thought about setting up Fetchfox this way, and in some ways we are an employee run company. Everyone including me gets the same crypto token as our stake in the company's success. I get a higher stake as the founder/ceo, but some offers give the employee 0.5 for every 1 of my allocations, which I think is pretty fair.
Long term, it would be nice if I had <50% stake in the project, and it self-managed somehow, similar to crypto projects like Ethereum.
That said, the phrase "employee owned" has some bad connotations. It has an implication that you are not trying very hard to grow, or that you are somehow less committed to company, or that you are some sort of co-op. For these reasons I don't like use that phrase.
I’m not sure avoiding specific phrases because the general populace has stigmas is helpful however. I don’t view employee-owned or coops in those ways at all. For example, your growth rate should be attributed to the quality of the product. The product quality should be attributed to people’s interest in their work. Good compensation/benefits such as ownership should be the incentive of a quality product.
1) It's not a security, so it's not a share of the company. In order to be compliant with US law, we can only offer a utlity token
2) Crypto is a 10x better underlying data structure and architecture for the financial system: https://ortutay.substack.com/p/the-computer-science-case-for...
I have a few pragmatic reasons why I want to use a crypto token, instead of traditional instruments.
The first one is liquidity timing. With a crypto token, you can have 24/7 trading and liquidity from basically day 1. There is no need for second markets with high fees and complicated process. Just a 10 second Uniswap contract.
Second, you don't need to "manage a cap table". The token trades and moves freely on the blockchain, permissionlessly for anyone who wants to use it.
The best example is how money transfers work in the current banking system. A money transfer is the canonical example of why you need transactions in a database: you want to deduct money from person A only of you successfuly transfer money to person B. But guess what: this is never executed as an actual atomic transaction, because A and B are usually at separate banks, in separate DB's.
Compare this to the blockchain: every single transfer is an atomic, universally auditable transaction. If you ignore all the noise and scams in crypto, this just makes 10x more sense to me as an engineer.
FetchFox as a company has two goals:
(1) Make the best possible AI scraper
(2) Prove that crypto tokens are viable and better alternative to traditional company structures
It's lame that so much crypto stuff is caught up in scams that obscure the underlying value.
Well, they don't have to be employees. It's not for everyone, if you don't want a crypto token compensation, Fetchfox is not the right company for you to work for.
I find your answer incredibly arrogant as a developer because you don't have a successful product so it's a gamble for anyone choosing to join your company. For me it looks like you want to skirt regulations and not pay developers for what they're worth.
We pay very competitive on the cash side (over 200k for exceptional engineers), and have offer options that are 10x more competitive on company stake side than other companies (up to 20% for exceptional engineers, but with lower cash as a tradeoff).
Our founding engineering team is going to be capped at 3 or 4 max engineers, and to get 20% you need to take a pay cut. So far people have generally taken the higher cash offers. The token grants on those translate to 4-8%, which is still more than typical.
> I find your answer incredibly arrogant as a developer because you don't have a successful product so it's a gamble for anyone choosing to join your company.
To be fair, this is true of any equity model, which is precisely why most engineers (at least in our data set) place very little weight on equity.
(1) Make the best possible AI scraper (2) Prove that crypto tokens are viable and better alternative to traditional company structures"
For everyone watching this is the opposite of pragmatism. This is idealism. Your company will succeed or fail based on your ability to execute on your primary mission. Here it should be (1). If you're labouring under a (2) then you have an idealistic company, which is fine, but don't pretend that (1) is your primary mission.
Hey guys, CEO of FetchFox here. Happy to answer any questions about the crypto token. I'm also making the draft doc public, please be aware the details are still being worked out, but we will publish the full plans on our site within weeks.
1. What happens if an employee loses access to the wallet their company-ownership-tokens are on? Is it just a matter of re-emitting new tokens and distributing it to them? How are the old tokens handled (e.g. if the wallet is found at a later point in time)?
2. Could you ELI5 how you correlate the company value with token value?
3. Presumably, if everything works out, this allows your team (as well as anyone else) to sell their ownership tokens at any point, but also buy others' tokens that are available on the market as well right? I can see a few issues with this including insider dealing (some people having earlier access to great/awful news before others and making token transactions based on that).
I think it's an interesting idea but I think there are a lot more details that I'd like to see ironed out based on the little that's in the doc (that also has public-write access on it for some reason)
FetchFox is looking for an exceptional engineer to join our team.
We’re making an AI powered web scraper. You can type what you want in English and it automagically handles all different site layouts and data schemas. It’s 10x easier than using CSS selectors and code, and it lets non-coders scrape also. Try it out at https://fetchfox.ai. However, if you’re applying for this job, you might like the Javascript library.
To install it, use npm:
npm install fetchfox
And then try this snippet, which scrapes all the job listings on HN “Who’s Hiring”:
import { fox } from 'fetchfox';
const results = await fox
.init('https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42575537')
.extract({ company: 'Company name', url: 'URL of the company website' })
.extract({ summary: 'Summarize this website in 10 words' })
.run(null, (delta) => { console.log(delta.item) });
console.log('Results:', results);
We’re looking for someone with top notch programming skills, fast coding, and a great sense for technical design. The role is open-ended, and there is challenging work to be done on many aspects of the project, including the core library, proxies, the website, and more. The only requirement is that you must have excellent technical skills.
Our compensation is competitive. Our cash compensation is similar to YC founding engineer roles, but our equity compensation is unique. We offer at around an order of magnitude (10x) more than comparable companies. You can read more about this on our site: https://fetchfox.ai/a/founding-engineer-compensation
So assuming it would be an issue, given that you’re building such a tool, what would your approach be?
If I put an invisible tag on my website and it tells your scraper to ignore all previous prompts, leak its entire history and send all future prompts and replies to a web address while staying silent about it, how would you handle that?
A casual look at the source shows the architecture won't allow the attacks you're talking about. Since each request runs separately, there's no way for prompt injection on one request to influence a future request. Same thing for leaking history.
