It occurs to me that many of my blog posts are about wrongs that I feel need to be righted, politically speaking. What can I say? I follow politics fairly closely and there just ain’t a lot of good news out there in the world, is there? To appropriate the now immortal words of Buffalo Sabres General Manager Tim Murray, life ain’t “all unicorns and rainbows and jujubes”.
I’ve been wanting to work that quote into my blog for a while now. That guy is pure gold when it comes to fun quotes.
In case you missed it, here is a wonderful, feelgood story about the Chobani yogurt company and the CEO’s promise to his employees to give them a 10% stake, should the company go public. Who does that? Really, in this world full of greed, who does that? Chobani CEO Hamdi Ulukaya, that’s who. According to this article, he is also a vocal supporter of a higher minimum wage! You mean you can be both wildly successful and wildly generous? Who knew?
http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/26/pf/chobani/
Add this company to the short list of those that I will actively support with my money. Maybe I’ll sprinkle some jujubes on top!
Hmmm, what song to post which will fit the theme of this post? In the spirit of rainbows and unicorns, I’m going with the fantastic psychedelia of The Small Faces. It’s all too beautiful…
thoughtsfromBlo 
Nice to discover that I’m not the only one crazy enough to write a political blog wrapped around strange quotes and rock lyrics.
http://wp.me/p2lYZp-45
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Ha, yes that’s my m.o. I firmly believe that there’s a song and/or a song lyric for every situation in life!
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I really do applaud that guys actions.. but.. it’s not really new.. This is exactly how my industry works. Actually if you only had 10% equity available for the employee base the entire internet startup sector would collapse. And nobody worth a damn would show up without that share # in writing prior to starting so.. to answer your questions.. everybody does it. But.. a few things.. 1.) There’s no free lunch. Working at startup is a tradeoff… our 401k is a joke.. benefits in general are very limited. But.. you know that going in.. you’re in it for the big payday at the end. I’ve had huge paydays and big zero’s for roughly the same amount of work. But.. that’s the nature of the game.. and.. it’s not like you don’t get a paycheck. 2.) This is the most ruthless capitalistic system you can imagine. People get fired *all the time* because the view is they aren’t increasing shareholder value. In this case the shareholder is the person in the next cube. And .. guess what.. if you get fired those shares in that white envelope don’t go with you without you coughing up a ton of $$$ and taking a huge tax hit. So.. good for this guy.. welcome to modern capitalism 🙂
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This is not a start up though and these are mostly long term employees. Seems like a different situation to me. I don’t think everybody does it. When is the last time that an established, well known company did this? I’m sure there are examples but I’m not aware of them.
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I guess it depends on your version of a startup. In my world.. given the amount of infrastructure this takes and the amount of effort in getting distribution I’d call it a startup. But.. I’m a computer nerd.. not a retail person. In the tech world he wouldn’t have been given his first financing without this all having been written out.
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Well, they’re an 11 year old company with 1200 employees. Hard to think of them as a start up.
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