In a leaked memo, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke put limits on employees having side hustles, saying Shopify requires ‘unshared attention’::Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke discourages employees from side hustles in company memo, saying their jobs require their undivided attention.
“I’m excited to share that Tobias “Tobi” Lütke, CEO and founder of Shopify, will join Coinbase’s Board of Directors.”, CEO Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, 31st Jan 2022.
Hmm. Sounds an awful lot like a side hustle.
Narrator: It was.
I’ve often wondered about this kind of thing. Are board members paid? How much time does it take to be one? It always seems like they have people on the board who are only tangentially connected to the company. Why is that?
Not terribly much time, by the looks of it. For example, look at the list of boards Disney CEO Bob Iger sits on:
https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/DIS/company-people
Publicly traded companies should have their board compensation made public. Iger sits on a lot of philinthropic organizations; I think 501c3’s will have that reported to the IRS. But he probably has a day long meeting for each once or twice a year.
Edit: here’s Bloomberg Philinthropic’s IRS filling (one of the boards Iger sits on). $10.9k per board member. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/205602483
For public companies you get elected by the share holders. If you own enough stock you can pretty much elect yourself. But otherwise it’s a game of trading favors… cause a lot of stock is owned by large stock funds and what not, so you have sort of power brokers deciding on a large quantity of votes that they don’t really own…