<story><title>Federal Reserve chair says decline in workers&apos; share of profits &apos;very troubling&apos;</title><url>http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-federal-reserve-powell-20180717-story.html#</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>methodover</author><text>The allocation of profits in startups, at least, feels... problematic.&lt;p&gt;I was the #2 engineer hire when I was hired five years ago. Since then, we haven&amp;#x27;t become super successful -- yet -- but we&amp;#x27;re at least at breakeven. We have three engineers and we&amp;#x27;re working on a huge new project that hopefully will really grow the company.&lt;p&gt;I have 1.8% equity.&lt;p&gt;Sometimes when I&amp;#x27;m working late or working on the weekend, which is often, I wonder: Is this really worth it?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m totally fine with taking a pay cut to build something new, in order to have the chance at making life changing money. But at the equity I have, we&amp;#x27;d need to be quite successful in order to get that.&lt;p&gt;The VCs who funded our seed and series A (the only funds we&amp;#x27;ve raised) will see the lion&amp;#x27;s share of the profits. Emotionally, that feels odd. We&amp;#x27;ve thrown a significant percentage of our lives, and they&amp;#x27;ve only thrown in money -- and a pretty small amount of it, really. I know it&amp;#x27;s supposed to make sense from a financial perspective or whatever, but &lt;i&gt;emotionally&lt;/i&gt; it doesn&amp;#x27;t feel fair.&lt;p&gt;But hey I guess it worked, I have what feels like a small percentage and yet I&amp;#x27;m throwing everything I have at this company. I&amp;#x27;m likely an outlier, though. I suspect that if VCs and founders gave employees a bigger piece of the pie, they&amp;#x27;d have a much more motivated workforce.</text></comment>
<story><title>Federal Reserve chair says decline in workers&apos; share of profits &apos;very troubling&apos;</title><url>http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-federal-reserve-powell-20180717-story.html#</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>legitster</author><text>To me it is pretty ridiculous how much labor is taxed, and how little capital is taxed. Especially if we are worried about automation and lack of productivity growth, it seems so counter-intuitive that we are completely stuck to a tax system that devalues workers.</text></comment>