Do employees leave primarily for money?

Jason Lemkin · Nov 3, 2023

Absolute compensation is not the biggest driver of employee retention today

Scope: specific to the present moment

33:31 20VC Roundtable: Why Early Stage Founders Should Not be Investing, Why Great Founders Have Low EQ, How the Structure of VC Firms Will Change, Will Founder-Led Funds Compete with Sequoia & Is Investing a Team Sport?

Cliff Weitzman · May 9, 2026

People almost never leave for money — they leave because something else in their life is unsatisfying, so retention means diagnosing and solving that thing

Examples: an employee leaving because he had no friends in the Bay Area (solved with a 50-person dinner), a COO needing a green card (solved by reading immigration law himself), an engineer in Ukraine (solved by flying there)

Scope: sometimes it is money, in which case just solve it

46:34 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify

Jeff Seibert · Nov 22, 2023 · hedged

The main force keeping talent inside overvalued 2021-vintage companies is cash compensation, not equity upside

Companies that raised huge rounds in 2021 pay high salaries, so switching to an earlier-stage company means more equity but far less cash

48:16 High cash compensation not equity upside keeps employees at overvalued companies

Harry Stebbings · Nov 3, 2023

An Amazon executive attributed the company's retention and performance to the absence of side activities and a stock that rose significantly every year, making 'leaving was losing'

Employees got richer each year through appreciating company stock, so departure was costly

33:06 Appreciating equity makes leaving too costly driving retention

Jack Altman · Nov 3, 2023

A handful of companies with commanding market dominance and extremely appreciating equity operate under different retention rules, so their playbook doesn't map to merely very good companies

Extreme equity appreciation changes employees' calculus in ways ordinary companies can't replicate

33:36 Extreme equity appreciation companies follow different retention rules

Jason Lemkin · Nov 3, 2023 · hedged

If appreciating equity really drove retention, people wouldn't be leaving OpenAI at an $80B tender valuation — and attrition at hot companies is accelerating relative to earlier eras like Facebook's

OpenAI reached an $80B valuation faster than Facebook did, yet people still leave, so equity upside alone doesn't hold people

33:57 Equity upside alone doesnt explain retention attrition still happens at hot companies

Auren Hoffman · Nov 3, 2023

Winning makes people somewhat more likely to stay, but it is only one variable: high attrition doesn't mean a company is bad and low attrition doesn't mean it's good, partly because winning companies recruit founder-type people who inevitably leave to start their own

Facebook lost 22 of its first 25 people within a few years and still became an amazing company; the type of person you recruit determines expected tenure

34:26 High attrition doesnt mean bad company founder type hires leave regardless