Buffer's Public Salaries
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A story about Buffer's experiment with salary transparency and how it evolved over time, as told by Sam Parr.
"Buffer started with this whole transparency thing - that was their whole shtick. It worked really well for getting attention, because Buffer's product isn't really special, there's so many different versions.
Leo, the cofounder who no longer works there, gave an interesting interview. Someone asked him about the transparency thing and whether it would work for others. He said something like 'It works now and it's great for us, but I have a feeling when we get to 75-80-90-100 people, it's not going to work anymore and it's actually going to hurt us big time.'
Someone high up at Apple said something similar - that the transparency thing actually hurts the company after a while. They had tried it themselves. I think maybe this works for startups but it kind of sucks after a long time. For example, if you own a small business doing $20 million in sales and you want to pay yourself $3 million a year, that's going to look pretty bad to a $50,000 receptionist. But that's your right to do that - why would you want to share that with everyone?"
Sam Parr
Host of MFM and fitness influencer
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.
In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.
Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.
After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.
Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.