Our founding engineering team is going to be capped at 3 or 4 max engineers, and to get 20% you need to take a pay cut. So far people have generally taken the higher cash offers. The token grants on those translate to 4-8%, which is still more than typical.
We pay very competitive on the cash side (over 200k for exceptional engineers), and have offer options that are 10x more competitive on company stake side than other companies (up to 20% for exceptional engineers, but with lower cash as a tradeoff).
1) It's not a security, so it's not a share of the company. In order to be compliant with US law, we can only offer a utlity token
2) Crypto is a 10x better underlying data structure and architecture for the financial system: https://ortutay.substack.com/p/the-computer-science-case-for...
Well, they don't have to be employees. It's not for everyone, if you don't want a crypto token compensation, Fetchfox is not the right company for you to work for.
I usually make a few different offers that have cash / token allocation tradeoffs. Higher token = lower cash, and lower cash makes you more like a founder.
Just to give a concrete example, for a recent very good candidate, the offer on the high token side was ~20% of the expect total allocation and 150k cash. There is also a higher cash option with lower token allocation.
For less exceptional candidates, the offers are a lower token allocation the equivalent cash.
> I've noticed that recruiters recently will use euphemisms for crypto/blockchain/etc
I've seen this also, and I think its lame.
This is why at Fetchfox I explicitly use the phrase "crypto token" in the article and in all offers offers to prospective hires. It's a crypto token, so we call it that.
There are a lot of negative associations with the term, but using euphemisms just confuses people and makes it seem like you're afraid or that you're trying to trick them. I say, call a spade a spade, and call Voldemort "Voldemort".
> Why does no one run a completely employee owned tech company?
I thought about setting up Fetchfox this way, and in some ways we are an employee run company. Everyone including me gets the same crypto token as our stake in the company's success. I get a higher stake as the founder/ceo, but some offers give the employee 0.5 for every 1 of my allocations, which I think is pretty fair.
Long term, it would be nice if I had <50% stake in the project, and it self-managed somehow, similar to crypto projects like Ethereum.
That said, the phrase "employee owned" has some bad connotations. It has an implication that you are not trying very hard to grow, or that you are somehow less committed to company, or that you are some sort of co-op. For these reasons I don't like use that phrase.
I have a few pragmatic reasons why I want to use a crypto token, instead of traditional instruments.
The first one is liquidity timing. With a crypto token, you can have 24/7 trading and liquidity from basically day 1. There is no need for second markets with high fees and complicated process. Just a 10 second Uniswap contract.
Second, you don't need to "manage a cap table". The token trades and moves freely on the blockchain, permissionlessly for anyone who wants to use it.
The best example is how money transfers work in the current banking system. A money transfer is the canonical example of why you need transactions in a database: you want to deduct money from person A only of you successfuly transfer money to person B. But guess what: this is never executed as an actual atomic transaction, because A and B are usually at separate banks, in separate DB's.
Compare this to the blockchain: every single transfer is an atomic, universally auditable transaction. If you ignore all the noise and scams in crypto, this just makes 10x more sense to me as an engineer.
FetchFox as a company has two goals:
(1) Make the best possible AI scraper
(2) Prove that crypto tokens are viable and better alternative to traditional company structures
It's lame that so much crypto stuff is caught up in scams that obscure the underlying value.
Hey guys, CEO of FetchFox here. Happy to answer any questions about the crypto token. I'm also making the draft doc public, please be aware the details are still being worked out, but we will publish the full plans on our site within weeks.
I checked the code and found the issue. It's a result of Gemini's larger context window.
Basically, the Foxtrot scraping library sends the page in chunks. The chunk size is capped at the max context length of each model, which for Gemini is 1,000,000 input tokens for lite. That's compared to 128,000 for GPT-4o-mini.
Typically, you won't need all the tokens in the page, and sending a million tokens when 100,000 will work is wasteful in terms of cost and runtime, and can also hurt accuracy.
I'm going to re-run the benchmarks with a cap on the prompt size for models like Gemini.
It also depends a lot on the person, I have a pretty high bar for "exceptional": https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-thing...