Learning From Los Gatos — The Peer Society — Medium

Learning From Los Gatos — The Peer Society — Medium: There’s a great book on this topic, called In The Company Of Owners, that documents just how distinct the Valley is from the rest of U.S. corporate culture. The top 100 tech companies granted 19% of their total ownership to non-senior-executive employees (i.e., everyone excluding the CEO and four lieutenants.) For the rest of corporate America, that number was 2%. In other words, when it came time to share rewards with ordinary employees, the Tech 100 were ten times more generous than low-tech firms. This is actually one of the hidden strengths of the tech sector in the US: its companies are much more competitive precisely because they are much more egalitarian in how they share their wealth internally. I would be surprised if there were any new industry in the history of capitalism that distributed its economic rewards to its employees as widely as Silicon Valley has. Billionaire founders or CEOs are nothing new. But multi-millionaire middle-managers? That’s something else altogether.