<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>shruubi</author><text>If the company can afford to offer competitive and attractive salaries to its employees, why would they offer equity? If I am a business owner and can afford to pay my staff well, why would I give up a portion of my company to the employees when I don&amp;#x27;t have to?&lt;p&gt;This is not some great injustice or a company acting in any kind of morally questionable way. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that in the grand scheme of things (not just the tech bubble), offering equity to employees is the exception, not the norm.</text><parent_chain><item><author>williamsmj</author><text>Not so for the employees &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;ekp&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1437516618553192449&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;ekp&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1437516618553192449&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>gigatexal</author><text>wow -- the founders are going to make out like bandits. No outside funding means no dilution.</text></item><item><author>switz</author><text>Here are some numbers I dug up:&lt;p&gt;Mailchimp has ~13MM users and 800k paying customers. In 2019 they had revenues of $700MM. In 2020 they had EBITDA of ~$300MM.&lt;p&gt;They are fully bootstrapped and have taken on zero outside funding.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Intuit to Acquire Mailchimp for $12B</title><url>https://www.investors.intuit.com/news/news-details/2021/Intuit-to-Acquire-Mailchimp/default.aspx</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>graeme</author><text>Giving employees equity is a form of funding. If a company is bootstrapped and profitable, they can just pay employees money instead. In theory this should mean Mailchimp employees were paid more money than employees doing similar work where they were given stock options.</text><parent_chain><item><author>williamsmj</author><text>Not so for the employees &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;ekp&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1437516618553192449&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;ekp&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1437516618553192449&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>gigatexal</author><text>wow -- the founders are going to make out like bandits. No outside funding means no dilution.</text></item><item><author>switz</author><text>Here are some numbers I dug up:&lt;p&gt;Mailchimp has ~13MM users and 800k paying customers. In 2019 they had revenues of $700MM. In 2020 they had EBITDA of ~$300MM.&lt;p&gt;They are fully bootstrapped and have taken on zero outside funding.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Intuit to Acquire Mailchimp for $12B</title><url>https://www.investors.intuit.com/news/news-details/2021/Intuit-to-Acquire-Mailchimp/default.aspx</url></story>