Compensation Philosophy

Our compensation philosophy is intended to enable Trinsic to hire the right people at the right time to ensure we achieve our vision: to make the world more accessible to people everywhere. Nothing is more important to us than hiring the right team and creating an environment they can do the work of their lives.

Our approach to compensation may be a bit different than what you're used to. We set salaries according to a pre-determined formula and don’t negotiate offers. Equity is an important part of each Trinsineer’s compensation. Let us know if you have any questions.

Transparency is one of our core values. Most companies:

This is a bad process, especially for the candidate. We do things differently.

When we find someone we want to work with, we give them our best offer right up front. Offer details are set based on a consistent, pre-determined formula to ensure fairness across the board. We give our best offer up front, and therefore don't negotiate the offers we give (by definition, that would not be transparent).

Some companies take this to an extreme by publishing everyone’s salaries publicly. We don’t do this; your compensation is your data, and you should be in control of how it’s shared.

An individual's race, color, religion, sex, gender, orientation, identity, age, or disability should not affect their compensation. By explicitly sharing our philosophy publicly and grounding it in objective principles, we intend on paying people equally for equal work. In addition to publishing this publicly, we:

We design compensation packages with meaningful equity components. If we're successful, stock options will be much more valuable than any cash salary that could be given. This aligns the whole team around the motivation to make the company successful instead of optimizing for one's own short-term career advancement.

We compensate our team very well. That said, our compensation packages are necessarily tailored to the stage of the company at the time of the offer. Being good stewards of our cash and vigilant about our runway makes Trinsic more likely to succeed and therefore increases the value of our equity. We have one shot to build a great company, and our cash is like fuel—we need to achieve our milestones before the tank runs dry.

Our goal with cash compensation at our stage is to ensure that our team can live comfortably wherever they're based.

We use market data of companies in our peer group (e.g. companies who’ve raised a seed round at $25m-$50m valuation, not Google and Apple) to set salaries. We use the following inputs to arrive at a salary band:

We target the 60th percentile for the cash component of our team’s compensation packages.

That means Trinsic pays salaries that are above average, but not at the very top of the market. For the stellar people we’re targeting, that may mean taking a modest cash pay cut relative to their earning potential. (Remember total compensation includes equity, so the total compensation may be closer to the top of the market.)

In addition to these factors, salaries are adjusted for inflation each year (we’ll never adjust salaries down for inflation).

All full-time Trinsineers are granted equity options when they join the team. Options are intended to align the team around the success of the company and reward the team for the risk associated with joining a startup. The number of equity options issued is based on:

We are as generous as we can be with equity without too hastily depleting the option pool.

We are pleased to provide the following benefits in addition to salary and equity.

How you spend your precious time on planet Earth is a lot more important than any compensation you could get in exchange for it. You’ll spend a lot of time working—and at Trinsic, we work to make sure your time is well-spent.