Since the article ends my mentioning Missouri, it is worth mentioning that his cofounder Jim McKelvey used his Square success to found Cultivation Capital, which is a VC focused on parts of the midwest often ignored by the coastal VCs (e.g. Missouri, Indiana, Southern Illinois, etc.)
Can anyone who's been though an IPO comment on what happened to the early employees with their 0.1% stake (of the original 10 million shares)? Everyone understands that they'll get diluted with new rounds, but when I read that Dorsey's giving away 40,000,000 shares I wonder what happened to the poor sap who started with 10,000. Do companies typically issue more options or RSUs to existing employees? How many?
Updated title on original source:
"Jack Dorsey is giving up at least 50% of his stake in Square to help underserved communities"<p><i>Update: This post has been updated to correct that Dorsey will commit 10 percent of the entire company, not just his equity as previously stated. In addition, our calculations were off and I regret the error.</i><p>This is commendable. Actually intending to making the world a better place (in the non HBO-Silicon-Valley-Show-way).
Depending on how he does this and the basis of the equity, this move may be an amazing tax shield, worth WAY more than it seems.<p>{edit} - I actually think this is exactly the strategy being applied by him and his team of tax strategists - He's using this "donation" as a tax shield and keeping the money in a foundation, which he can use to help "the underprivileged" as he pleases, instead of just paying an amazing amount of tax like Zuck did.
I must be hugely cynical because my first thought was "what has this guy done to commit so much to public benefit." There <i>is</i> an unnatural or questionable amount of money for people to give up isn't there?
Does anyone else feel like it's the government's responsibility to help all the needy sections of the society, and billionaires intervening only abets and condones all the deliberate/unintentional mistakes of the former, and lets them escape it?
My first reaction was that funding artists, musicians, and business is probably not the greatest charitable good that can be done with his money... but then I reconsidered -- It might not be the greatest good, but it is more good than leaving the money in the bank. So... OK, I'll give it a mild thumbs up.
Part of helping underserved communities would be to move some of the business outside the Valley and major metro areas. Find the mid to small cities and spread the wealth.
he should use that to save Twitter but good on him for getting his priority straight and putting human lives over some glorified text publishing app that gives the world an insight into our most mundane daily mental noise that we otherwise would've never spewed if it wasn't for such social media platforms.
I'd prefer these announcements wait until the stake has been distributed.<p>I think it's been over a year since reddit said the community would receive a 10% stake in the company (or maybe it was just a direct payout of 10% of the amount raised in a previous round). I haven't heard anything about it since.