👋 Howdy to the 4,375 new legends who joined this week! You are now part of a 70,296 strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🔥 Unfiltered: The Inside Scoop On Attio Redefining CRM. Attio opens up about launching a category challenging company.
🦕 Turning Networks Into Growth Engines. An interview with Mac Reddin, CEO of Commsor.
🍄 Mario, Luigi & The Long History Of Nintendo. A story of a video game behemoth beginning all the way back in the 1800s, and still thriving today.

PARTNERS 💫

HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Today’s post should be a fun one. A little build-in-public if you will on something that is incredibly important in every organisation, benefits.

Oh and P.S. there was zeroo proof-reading on this one. Enjoy the typos!

BUILDING IN PUBLIC 🔎

Let’s Talk About Benefits, Baby

There are countless ways to improve a culture at a company. One of the least sexy ways is to improve your benefits. No one is writing best selling books on benefits. Twitter threaboiis banging away their keyboards telling people all the ways co-working passes work. But while they may sit behind total comp, and the overall way you treat people, benefits are important.

That’s why today we are diving face-first into the topic. It wouldn’t be hyperbole to say the benefits package we offer at Athyna goes a long way towards our 90% engagement score averages. For context: that’s world class. So let’s do it. Open Source CEO, the Benefit’s Edition.

“Mummy, where do benefits come from?”

Benefits are not a new phenomenon. Benefits in the earliest sense started in ancient civilizations like Egypt, Rome, and Greece. Workers, and especially skilled labourers or soldiers, often received housing, food, or land in exchange for their services.

It was in the throws of the industrial revolution though, that the benefits of today started to take the shape. First, really just in the form of safety. Physical safety, and also wage protections. Railroad and mining companies were among the first to offer benefits in the 1800s, primarily providing company doctors since workplace injuries were common.

The came more progressive practices, Henry Ford, of Ford Motors fame, began offering higher wages and reduced work hours— hello 8-hour workday—to attract and retain workers. But it was really the 1940s-1950s that benefits really took off. During wartime, wage controls were in place, so companies competed for talent by offering perks like health insurance, pensions, and paid vacations.

Fast forward more decades, and unions lead to retirement plans, tech leads to ping pong tables, who knows, maybe in the 2040s we’ll have robot masseuses in every office around the world.

Benefits are bidirectional

When you think about benefits though, the mind usually goes to the employee. What does the employee get from the company, or what does the employer give to the worker. But that’s a little bit shortsighted. There are huge (!!) benefits that go both ways with a great benefits structure. Benefits aren’t a cost, they are an investment.

Think about it. Better benefits usually mean; less burnout, lower turnover, high productivity, better culture, easier hiring. The list goes on. Here are a few stats around some of these factors.

_{*Note: I pulled these from various sources but skipped the citations. I’ll do better next time I swear.}

Next, we are going to look into a few of the key pillars to Athyna’s compensation and benefit programs that have worked really well to keep our team engaged over the years.

PARTNERS 💫

Get Your Team Booked on 3.8 Million Podcasts Automatically

The best way to advertise isn't Meta or Google – it's appearing on podcasts your customers love.

PodPitch.com automates thousands of weekly emails for you, pitching your team as ideal guests.

Big brands like Feastables use PodPitch.com instead of expensive PR agencies.

Get your FREE personalized demo!

#1: Parental leave (paternity + maternity)

The first benefit I want to highlight is parental leave. The most exciting, but also most stressful time in a young families life is having the child. When building out the company, we wanted to make sure we were taking care of both birth parents, enabling the family to be able to enjoy the time with their newborn kiddo.

_{*Note: the data in the chart below if from 2019, but similar policies apply today.}

On paper it’s great to look after people, especially taking care of both parents, but in practice it’s even better. See this lovely message sent from Mailen, one of our recruitment leaders, who is about to take off for leave to have her second child.

What’s even better is her husband, Lich, happens to be our Head of Finance at Athyna, so he will take time off too. We’ve been through a lot together Lich and I, with the last two years being incredibly stressful for long periods—periods which have thankfully passed—so to be able to see him step away and take some time to enjoy the experience of becoming a father for a second time is very rewarding for me.

#2: Equity from intern to executive

The second incredibly powerful benefit we boast is a world class equity incentive plan. And let me firstly start by saying how disappointed most equity plans are. They are bullshit in most cases if you ask me. They are often nothing more than a bait and switch.

‘Come and join us, we have great equity,’ companies will often boast, but then you find out that: a) the stock are options, so you need to pay, and b) you have a short exercise period after leaving / vesting or they go back to the companies equity pool. Not to mention early stage company stock is incredibly valuable, but fraught with danger. Most companies fail. I truly believe that the way to creating lasting impact for your team is to build a large valuable company, and share in the upside.

So at Athyna, on day 1 we carved out 20% of the company in an RSU (Restricted Stock Units) pool for the team. Most companies allocate 10-15 percent to their equity pool, and most again, use options. What is the difference between options and RSUs?—well, RSUs are a gift. They don’t need you to pay. We give you piece of the company.

_{*And—this is kinda nerdy, deep in the weeds technical stuff—we have a double trigger clause in our RSUs to cover any potential tax liability one might have with the first trigger being vesting, and the second trigger being a liquidity event.}

I actually can’t believe people issue options. It drives me nuts. If you come and join my company, and you work your butt off for a number of years, you will be rewarded. This statement rings true from intern to executive.

This initiative gives our team true ownership, and gives them a vested interest in making things work. And getting the company to a wonderful financial results in the future. I want the earliest members of our team to be able to go and buy houses with their Athyna stock. And I think we are well on our way to making that happen.

#3: Investment program

This third opportunity is something that I stole from one of my favourite digital uncles, Scott Galloway. Scott mentioned the other day on his Prof G Show podcast that his employer, Vox Media, doesn’t actually pay him on a regular basis but instead, he uses their salary sacrifice program to invest his pre-tax income.

When I heard this, I realised how well this would work as a bidirectional benefit for Athyna to boost working capital, while paying roughly double (when adjusted for pre vs post-tax investing) what investing in the stock market would historically pay per annum. In the vast majority of cases worldwide people investing are investing their post-tax earnings. So ~30% less than their pre tax amount. At Athyna, we have an employee investment scheme in which our team can invest a lump sum, or divert a small % of the wage to receive a 10% pre-tax return.

Here is a super simple explanation of the math behind the two investment opportunities, using round figures for ease of conversation.

_{*Note: working off historically stock market returns of 7% per annum.}

As you can see, the Athyna investment scenario, offers more than twice as much of a return in the same amount of time. The illustration below shows what the impact of that would look like if it played out over time.

As you can see, this works wonderfully as an investment vehicle for the team, and the craziest thing is, there is next to no risk. For Athyna, or any other company it works great too as to loan money from elsewhere you would pay 13-18% typically.

Summary / Future

It’s very easy to sit here today and talk about all the things that are wrong in the world. And how hard we have it at work. But in the grand scheme of things, we are in a better place than probably any time in history. Hell, most of our ancestors where peasants bound to work on land owned by nobles or lords.

Considering this, I think we should be excited about the future. Work, will likely be more and more flexible, with better and better benefits, and if our policy makers—and big tech overlords—do their jobs well enough, it might even be less and less hours as well.

Fun facts

Extra reading

And that’s it! If you enjoy this and want to learn more about Athyna, you can see what we do here.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

Just watched a cool chat between Seema Amble and Zapier’s Wade Foster. It’s all about how Zapier built a growth engine that took them to profitability in just three years using a product-led strategy.

I liked it cause it’s packed with solid advice on branding and customer experience that's super applicable for startups like mine. Definitely worth a watch if you're looking for some practical growth tips!

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

ASK ME ANYTHING 🗣

I want to be a trusted resource for you. If you think anything I know in relation to brand, culture, global teams, sales and growth would help you unblock a problem in your weeks shoot me a line.

Ask in the comments or reply to this email and I will do my best to answer it in a future edition. 🙌🏼

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Attio—powerful, flexible and data-driven, the exact CRM your business needs.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳