Introduction & Overview

Our employee compensation philosophy is built upon five core principles that guide our approach to compensation and benefits. These principles reflect our commitment to attracting and retaining the best talent in the industry while also promoting fairness, transparency, and alignment with our long-term goals.

At a high level, the core principles of our philosophy are ordered as follows:

Talent density - We offer competitive compensation to attract and retain the best talent to achieve our mission.
Ownership - We incentivize through equity ownership of the company and design our philosophy around the long-term interests of our customers, employees, investors, and other relevant stakeholders.
Fairness - We ensure equal pay for equal work, regardless of race, color, religion, sex, gender, orientation, identity, age, or disability.
Transparency - We maintain transparency with policies, applications, and data supporting our compensation philosophy to reinforce accountability to the other core principles.
Treat People Like Adults - We select benefits that align with our mission and vision. We generally avoid benefits and allowances that are not directly connected to these, preferring to offer competitive compensation packages and letting employees make their own choices.

These principles are all important aspects of a healthy philosophy, and we will strive to find balance across them. Trade-offs inevitably arise during the application of our philosophy. We have listed the principles in order of importance and will generally prioritize the top principles over those following (e.g., it is more important that we recognize exceptional performance with compensation than strictly pay everyone exactly the same).

Our compensation philosophy and application should be viewed and applied consistently with our values from the Culture Handbook.

Table of Contents

What’s changed (not much!)

The content of this memo may look and feel a bit different from our previous philosophy ([Deprecated] Levels Compensation Philosophy - November 2021). In reality, very little has changed with respect to our underlying philosophy.

This document is written through the lens of principles underlying our compensations, which differs from previous versions which described how and why we made decisions through different elements of compensation (e.g. salary, equity, benefits).

The purpose of the change is to place more emphasis on why we do things and less on what we do to facilitate understanding and alignment. The latter (what we do) is still important - in the spirit of transparency, we’ll still maintain strong documentation around what we are doing. This will live in our policies and procedures documentation and will be mainly outside the scope of this memo. We still reference a few applications of our philosophy here where the examples help facilitate understanding of our philosophy.

An added benefit of this structure is that it will help us scale our documentation and approach to how we do things from a compensation perspective.

This philosophy document is designed to be more broadly applicable and will need less frequent updating.
Our policies and procedures are evergreen documents and we expect to update and refine them regularly. Having a distinction between the two types of documentation will help us separate policy and philosophy and iterate more quickly on our policies.

Core Principles

1. Talent density

Our commitment to fostering a high-performance culture is rooted in the belief that exceptional talent is the key to our success. To attract and retain the industry's best talent, we must offer competitive compensation packages that reward and recognize employees for their exceptional performance and contributions.

Benchmarks

We use benchmarks from the most talent-dense technology market in the US (San Francisco) and pay at the top of the market based on market data for salary and equity. This also helps align with some of our other principles (fairness and equality, transparency).

Exceptional Performance

We typically maintain compensation at benchmark, but in line with the principle we are not bounded strictly by the bands when we’re recruiting exceptional talent and rewarding exceptional performance. The factors we consider are: