The Tech Money Podcast

If you want to learn about money, finances, retirement then Malcolm and his podcast is for you!

This is a financial advice podcast. Sometimes it’s hard to evaluate if advice podcasts are giving useful advice unless you have firsthand experience with the subject being discussed. In the case of Ep. 69, I do. The thesis of the episode is that a tech recession is a golden opportunity for tech workers to negotiate large equity packages that will balloon when tech stocks recover. This thesis seems to be based on a single data point: the guest, Brooke Harley (who has a vested interest in pitching her seminar on how to negotiate equity packages), had a single lucky break by joining Lulu Lemon at a historically low point in the stock’s history. She bolsters this point by telling listeners to simply look at Airbnb’s stock and imagine having been laid off and quickly receiving an offer from Airbnb in December 2022, and then extrapolating this to other tech companies like Amazon and Google. She suggests a strategy of leveraging multiple offers to drive up equity packages. Do it now while stocks are low - getting laid off is the opportunity of a lifetime. The host and guest chat about how companies are going to be happy to trade cash comp for equity now because they’re worried about their bottom line and have already committed to a new hire or annual refresh equity pool from which they can draw to improve their offers. As an executive level employee at a tech company, I can say that this advice is incredibly tone deaf in the current market for the following reasons: 1) The first thing we did as tech companies, long before layoffs, was to freeze or dramatically curtail hiring and hiring is still at 10-year lows; 2) Boards of directors are putting pressure on tech C-suites to reduce both cash and equity based compensation; 3) There are now 200,000+ tech workers out of work and fighting for extremely scarce jobs. All of this means that workers are unlikely to be able to negotiate their dream equity packages now due to lack of competing/multiple offers and employers are taking a much more conservative approach to compensation. Laid off tech workers have little leverage in this market. Just imagine you were laid off and quickly joined Airbnb with a big negotiated equity package in December? That’s not imagination, that’s a pipe dream.

Thank you Malcolm for breaking concepts down in a practical way and especially for bringing on experts who share out-of-the-box wealth building strategies I’ve never heard of. Well done!

One of my new fav podcasts!