1/20 Q. “What are the best and worst things about being a CEO?”
A. “If you don’t like working 24/7 7 days a week, this job is not for you; also, it’s a little bit of being a school teacher, meaning like, you know, I have 150 employees, the company I ran

2/20 “before @CelsiusNetwork had 1,500 employees, and every day you have issues: The kids are fighting, somebody didn’t show up to school, somebody forgot their lunch, you name it. A lot of kind of making sure that everybody is happy. Also, if you think of it like OK, you
3/20 “have a bus, but you need to fill it with people and you need to make sure that everybody gets put in the right seat on the bus. If you put the wrong person in the driver’s seat or on the brakes, or whatever, holding the door from opening, keeping the windows
4/20 “closed, disaster will happen. So a lot of it is kind of looking at the macro things that make a company successful. For example, for me with @CelsiusNetwork, we had a lot of employees who kept saying to us, ‘You’re giving too much to the community, we’re never going to
5/20 “‘break even, we’re never going to be profitable’; even CEL token, they kept saying, 'CEL token is stuck at $0.03 for a year and a half.' It was stuck at $0.03. You could have bought millions of CEL tokens for $0.03, it’s now $3.00.
6/20 “So a lot of people were saying, ‘Look, it’s never going to go up.' And I’m like, no, you just have to wait until the community is big enough and then enough of them are going to earn in CEL and we’re going to be buying millions.
7/20 “Now we’re buying $3 million every week, $3 million worth of CEL token out of the market; we are sucking it like a vacuum cleaner. Now it’s easy, now everybody is a genius, 'of course CEL token.' But buying it at $0.03 and believing that the flywheel and everything
8/20 “and acting in the best interest of the community and scaling this… Just believing in the fact that people will give us $4 billion was something -- even my employees were saying, ‘C’mon, Alex.’ So as a CEO, you have to be not just steadfast but you have to have so much
9/20 “conviction. If you show 1% of uncertainty to your employees, then they run away, because they’re like OK, even our leader doesn’t believe in it. So even if you have doubts yourself, you’re not allowed to show any emotion.
10/20 “They say the CEO job is the most lonely job in the world because you can’t share anything with anyone; you can’t share your fears, you can’t share your — you can only share your excitement, but you cannot share anything that is not positive with anyone because it
11/20 “propagates like cancer very, very quickly. If you’re not confident or you don’t see a great future or whatever, the employees just leave, they have plenty of opportunities; they can jump ship in a minute and go and work somewhere else. It is a very difficult job.
12/20 “Again, this is my 8th time being CEO, so for me I’m doing it in my sleep. But if you’re a first-time CEO and you’re facing all these challenges, there’s no one to talk to. Who are you going to talk to? Your VP of finance or your head of sales? Your mom? 'Mom, I need help!’
13/20 “That’s why we say ‘Leaders are not born, they’re made.' Having that experience, being able to manage people, being able to lead people, being able to solve problems faster than they — because with a startup, the problem is, if you have a major problem, it will bring down
14/20 “the whole company if you don’t solve it fast enough. So you don’t have time. You got to solve it real quick. And here, we have the lives and the savings of 250,000 people in our hands, so the responsibility is huge. It’s not like, OK, Alex is going to lose a little
15/20 “bit of money. This is $4 billion of people's — this is their college fund, their dream for retirement, them taking care of their parents, them paying off their loans; it is their livelihood that is in our hands. So we don’t take it lightly. We really understand the weight
16/20 “on our shoulders. That’s why, again, we’re not trying to get you 200% like some of these crazy crypto projects. We are promising high single digits, because we don’t want to take — the key is to earn as much as possible by taking the least amount of risk.
17/20 “On March 12th #bitcoin crashed 40% in 12 hours. We walked out of it smelling like a rose. Everybody else had billions of dollars in liquidations; they lost most of their customers. But also, when the market went up like crazy, we kept paying the same rate; we didn’t go
18/20 “like DeFi and say, oh, here’s 300% return or whatever. Slow and steady wins the race here. We always say that the winners in crypto are the people who finish the race, you don’t have to be number 1, it doesn’t matter if you’re number 1,000.
19/20 “As long as you HODL and you got your coins and the coins increased in value, you’re going to do exceptionally well. You don’t need to be the guy that dies with the most dollars; that doesn’t matter. For most people, they take leverage or they do all kind of
20/20 “crazy stuff, that’s not what we recommend. We are definitely trying to find the safest way to get there, to get to financial retirement.” — Alex Mashinsky | Should You Use Celsius Network? The Truth w/CEO Alex Mashinsky YouTube Interview | Dec 24, 2020

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“We don’t negotiate salaries” is a negotiation tactic.

Always. No, your company is not an exception.

A tactic I don’t appreciate at all because of how unfairly it penalizes low-leverage, junior employees, and those loyal enough not to question it, but that’s negotiation for you after all. Weaponized information asymmetry.

Listen to Aditya


And by the way, you should never be worried that an offer would be withdrawn if you politely negotiate.

I have seen this happen *extremely* rarely, mostly to women, and anyway is a giant red flag. It suggests you probably didn’t want to work there.

You wish there was no negotiating so it would all be more fair? I feel you, but it’s not happening.

Instead, negotiate hard, use your privilege, and then go and share numbers with your underrepresented and underpaid colleagues. […]