Maximum Value

By editor on February 20, 2018 — 1 min read

Companies generally only give employees 5–10% of the value that they create. As much value as I created at Facebook, I captured maybe 5% of that value for me, economically. That’s just the scenario. That’s how companies can get built to be profitable.

An interesting question would be, well what would happen if companies were forced to pay more towards the theoretical ceiling of what an individual generated for that company? 50% of the value. 80% of the value. You can’t do that in the absence of transparency.

When you’re hiring me, it’s not like every other person who’s trying to hire me also knows.

So to me, it’s a really disruptive idea that the very, very, good can basically become like free agents in sports. You can’t hide Lebron’s value. Lebron gets max value. Dwight Howard gets max value. Brent Seabrook gets paid what Brent Seabrook gets paid. It’s beautiful. If you bring that sort of clarifying logic into the business world, it could be really transformational, and it lifts up all these amazing people from all the four corners of the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDVDWNguPs4 (41:36)

Posted in: Leadership

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.