Steven Pope

And then he went and networked and cold called like crazy and then got the planes and then basically subleased them out and everybody wins.

Like that's a very common start a business trope, but or motif, if you will, theme, if you will.

And

The question of like, when do you give equity to a senior employee?

Well, at my Amazon guy, I haven't given equity to anybody and you don't have to, but you hear a lot of people talk about it, especially in SAS.

And this is usually a retention methodology.

The problem with it is like, because I'm such a transparent business owner, I can't do that to my employees.

And some of you don't follow this quite yet.

I'm going to break it down.

But basically, equity is fake.

And what happens in these SaaS companies is that they give out a half percentage point of equity when you join, but then they do two, three, four rounds of funding, and all of a sudden your half point is now 1 10th of a point or 1 20th of a point.

And what you thought was gonna be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars ends up being 20K, 30K.

And you started with a startup salary, making 50% less than what you could have at corporate world, and you actually come out behind.

And so those people who have been burned by equity divisions, and by the way, I'm one of them, know better.

And so if I were to start giving out equity, I don't think it would attract new talent that's smart, first of all.

It would retain talent that doesn't know better.

And I have a competitor agency that's recruited over 30 employees from my Amazon guy and is giving those guys equity, like almost all of them, which makes me scratch my head, actually, because if you're giving everybody equity, then what's it actually worth?

Nothing.

It's worth nothing.

And this particular competitor, which I'm not going to name, but it won't be hard for you to figure it out if you see the LinkedIn organizations of how many employees are from my Amazon guy.