by Chris Hulls on February 7, 2009
I’ve heard a lot of talk recently about how great it is that Obama is flexing some muscle and reigning in executive pay for companies that have received bailout money. I agree that this is great news, as I didn’t think any mainstream politician would actually take a stand and hold Wall Street accountable (both democrats and republicans seem to think its OK to privatize profits while nationalizing losses). But, as pleased as I am, I’m very worried that this is just a red herring that will pacify the masses without really changing a thing.
Why do I think this? Well here are just a few reasons:
- History repeats itself. Every time we’ve tried to reign in executive pay in the last 20 years executives have always found loopholes
- Companies that have already received TARP money are under no obligation to follow the guidelines (so some just will opt out of taking more money; I mean, we already gave them $1,000,000,000,000)
- The cap explicitly allows for restricted stock grants without any caps, and most of the really harsh stuff only applies to the top executives (remember the average compensation at Goldman last year was something like $600,000–even when you included janitors and secretaries)
On the topic of loopholes, a cursory look over the proposal shows some pretty obvious gaps: [click to continue…]
by chrishulls on November 27, 2008
I got the good news this week that I won the SlideShare Credit Crisis Competition which I entered last month with a few of my coworkers. We are now the proud new owners of a brand new iPod Touch, which we are going to use to test some of our company’s cool mobile applications.
While this victory was more of an amusement than anything else, the $300,000 me and my company won from Google a couple months ago was anything but trivial, and doing contests has been one of the best decisions I’ve made as a rookie startup CEO. If you are like I was (clueless, poor, and no track record), do it. Win or lose, and regardless of any potential monetary prize, a contest could be what gets your startup off the ground.
Here is a b
rief chain of events that can show you how contests have helped me:
I started my company in 2007; I was clueless and had a crappy team. I outsourced to India and failed. I spun my wheels for the good part of a year.
This past spring, I entered the Berkeley Business Plan Competition, and the Stanford e-Challenge.
At an event mixer, I met Dilpreet, a software engineer turned Haas MBA student, who started helping me with the competition. I also met Jesse Gibbs who helped us with our marketing.
After about 2 weeks, Dilpreet decided he was more useful as a tech guy than as an MBA, and we started work on an entry for the Android Developer Challenge. [click to continue…]
