His name was Dan Price, and his company was "Gravity."
Remember what was said about how foolish he was, how he was a "socialist", how his business would surely fail?
Well, that was six months ago. Now:
But, after all that, he must be going broke, right?
Guess not.
Maybe keeping all of the money at the top isn't such a great business plan. What do you think?
source
I was going to start a thread about this but figured it'd be redundant so why not resurrect this one.
Attacking him for being a "socialist" and predicting failure was stupid. However, the way this guy's cheerleaders are lapping up his self-promotion is kind of foolish. A few problems with all this:
He routinely taunts and attacks publicly traded companies on social media for not compensating like him. What's disingenuous about this? It's that he knows many of these companies are publicly traded. So ask him why he won't take Gravity Payments public. He's likely to answer as follows (which actually comes from his website): "Because we’re a privately held company, our focus is always going to be on creating long-term relationships—not on squeezing partners to maximize quarterly earnings."
If he acknowledges that going public would prevent him from being able to execute on his compensation strategy, then why spend so much time attacking publicly traded companies for not executing this strategy? I'd kind of like to challenge Dan to start a restaurant or retail business, take it public, and then see if he could still project himself as a hero regarding employee compensation. I'm sure he couldn't, for the very reasons he points out as to why he wouldn't want to take Gravity public. So why attack other companies for their compensation structures? This is just messed up. But his Twitter followers adore his criticisms of publicly traded companies. They don't bother to contemplate these things.
Another thing that's comical is how much attention he's tried to drum up for himself about not only raising his starting compensation, but that he cut his own to $70k as well, as if that were so altruistic. Why is that comical? Because Dan Price
owns Gravity Payments. His net worth has ballooned as a result of that. His official salary is insignificant, because he's an owner. Numerous other CEOs pay themselves little to nothing (just enough to not be designated a volunteer), because their real compensation is in business equity, and it dwarfs whatever their official salary would have been.
Another thing that's a little bit weird is the controversy around the timing of his $70k minimum compensation announcement relative to the timing of when he was served with papers from being sued by his brother, Lucas. When you start digging into that and reading what Lucas has had to say about him, it kind of begs the question of who the "hero" of this story (if any) really is.
And if you want to keep going deeper into personal character, there's also the pretty heinous domestic violence accusations his ex-wife made about him. Granted this is personal, not business, and obviously it's hard to know who to believe in a family feud when one person is holding a bag with hundreds of millions of dollars in it.
The guy is an admitted narcissist who runs a private payment processing business that earns about a half million dollars per employee. I don't care that he pays his lowest paid employees $70k. I don't care that he's liberal. I don't care that he's a narcissist. I just find his adoring followers quite gullible and relatively uncritical/unthinking about all this stuff.
