Hello and welcome to the latest A16Z podcast. I'm Matt Oberhardt. This episode is a conversation

all about compensation from the simple act of defining what compensation is to discussing how to build

and develop an overall comp philosophy for your company. There's a lot of great content in here

around affordability versus competition, pluses and minuses of RSUs versus options, and a whole lot more.

This conversation includes the following voices in this order.

Steve Cadigan, talent advisor and co-founder at ISDI Digital University.

Greg Lohman, who's a principal at Compensia.

Tan Nguyen, who's an executive director at Connery Consulting, and A16Z partner Shannon Schiltz,

who leads our HR, tech talent, and people practices teams. This recording and podcast is based

on an event held at Andreessen Harwoods. As Matt said, I'm a recovering human resource professional.

Such a broad topic we have today, and everyone in here is probably looking at it and coming at it from a different place, given your background, given the organizations you've been in and are in today.

I was with LinkedIn from a pre-IPO through IPO, which included the day we went public, realizing that we had to switch from an options to an RSU program that night

because the stock was just going wild. So experienced a lot of craziness and also, like many

of you, competing for really endangered species, software developers and engineers in the

valley, puts a real strain on it. You know, it used to be you could do a salary survey once

a year and you're feeling like you're pretty on top of what the competitive environment was. And if you're not doing it

quarterly or even monthly now, you may be missing something. And that puts a big pressure, I think,

on all of us to be competitive. And who you're competing for and how their programs are changing

is really, it's almost like the tide, right?

Lots of undercurrents and lots of things going on and flashy news that gets people's attention.

So maybe a good place to start would be to just unbundle some of the terms we use in compensation around.

There's comp, there's total rewards, you know, equity and pieces like that.

...