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:

1. 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.
2. Talent density - We offer competitive compensation and a mission-oriented culture designed to attract, retain and align the best talent.
3. Fairness - We ensure equal pay for equal work, regardless of race, color, religion, sex, gender, orientation, identity, age, or disability.
4. Transparency - We maintain transparency with policies, applications, and data supporting our compensation philosophy to reinforce accountability to the other core principles.
5. 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.

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What’s changed

This philosophy is an update on our [Deprecated] Levels Compensation Philosophy - April 2023 that reflects some changes in how we look at compensation. The key changes in this version are:

• Ownership replaces Talent Density as the top core principle. This doesn’t diminish the value of either principle to our overall philosophy. It does effectively emphasize how important the ownership and mission-oriented alignment we want to create with our philosophy is. It also reinforces that equity, at this stage of our company lifecycle, is the most valuable form of compensation we can offer employees.

• Talent Density principle has been updated to emphasize a well-rounded experience. This section was primarily cash-focused, but it has been updated to reflect all important aspects of talent density. This now includes the opportunities to join a high-performance, mission-oriented team working on an incredibly important mission. Equity, and particularly salary-based compensation principles remain competitive but are viewed in the balance of other aspects of the broader philosophy. This reinforces the position that we will prioritize compensation decisions that best enable us to achieve our mission and maximize the ownership (equity) value element of compensation.

• Benchmarks and Annual Adjustments. Language referencing benchmarks has been updated to reflect that compensation is informed, but not driven by benchmarks. We consider business needs, performance and market conditions when making decisions about pay rates.

Core Principles

1. Ownership

Our first core principle is centered around ownership. Our compensation should be aligned with the long-term interests of customers, employees, investors, as well as our our long-term goals. At the startup stage of our business, we incentivize ownership primarily through equity compensation. We’ve published the memo ‣ to dig further into this important concept.

Equity and Ownership

As a venture-backed startup, equity ownership in the company is a significant part of our compensation package. At a high level, we believe:

1. All full-time employees should be owners in the business and have an equity stake. This promotes a healthy culture that doesn't divide classes of employees. It also encourages long-term thinking and decision-making "as an owner, not a renter".