Liquidity and Team Turnover

By editor on January 28, 2018 — 1 min read

Bringing liquidity into companies sooner will actually allow companies to bake longer and more patiently. So part of what this vehicle is, is about bringing liquidity sooner in a company’s lifecycle.

If we can take this company, use it to acquire something else, and that CEO is now able to compensate their employees — as counterintuitive as it sounds, I suspect that they are less likely to leave. Now you can have employees stay at a business for seven, eight, nine, ten years, which used to be the historical norm. And now it’s not.

If liquidity was a more traditional, predictable, thing, many people would actually say, “You know what? I like these people here. I like the mission of the company. I want to continue to help advance their goals. And now that you’ve solved my compensation problem, I’m willing to commit.”

Part of this vehicle is trying to turn back the incentive towards people staying at companies longer, which is going to be required if you’re going to try and solve hard problems.

Right now the Silicon Valley attrition rates in most companies is 20%. That means every five years your entire employee base is turned over. How do you do anything valuable if everybody’s new, every five years? It’s probably not possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMotykw0SIk (44:20)

Posted in: Entrepreneurship

Editor's Note

These are Chamath Palihapitiya's words. They are probably some of the best thoughts on VC, business, and life, but were scattered around the Internet. They live now in this archive.