"When we sold the company, the biggest effort went into making sure the employees got taken care of, and they all hate me now."
whoa.. why do his employees hate him now?
i think because they only got a few hundred K each and thought they deserved way more
Nah, iirc he always paid his employees well. When he got a $3 million dividend back in 2011, he distributed all of it to his employees. I think there were only around 40 workers when Microsoft bought them in 2014, so everyone probably got a nice $75k bonus:
http://www.minecraftforum.net/news/7645-notch-gives-3-million-to-mojang-employees
The only thing I really saw on the hate was this tidbit:
When we sold the company, the biggest effort went into making sure the employees got taken care of, and they all hate me now.
...
One Mojang employee responds that he only hated Persson during the initial shock of him leaving, but Persson rejects that, saying “nobody reached out and said it was just initial shock.
Microsoft bought out the stakes of the top three guys for like $2.5 billion (I think Notch got something like $1.7 billion) & then they abruptly left. So imagine working at a startup, the startup goes huge ($80 million within 2 years of starting the company) but the core crew stays small, and then two years after that, the three founders suddenly disappear with huge payouts. I've read he gave each employee like $300k when he left, so it's not like people didn't make out financially (which, as employees, was not a payout they were entitled to). But I saw a BTS video of working at Mojang back in the day & it seemed like a pretty tight-knit crew, so I think it was most of how the culture changed from having their fearless leader disappear out of the blue.
I really feel more bad for Notch. It sounds like the employees got a nice payday and basically a lifetime job at Microsoft, whereas Notch made bank but lost his work friends & pretty much got isolated from everyone else due to his wealth. I remember reading articles about him buying a $70 million home in California, throwing lavish parties, and realizing nobody was really there to be his friend, but just for his money. We're social creatures...even us introverts talk online on forums & chatrooms to get our social fix now & then. Flying solo into billions & getting cut off from society like that would probably make a lot of people get kinda depressed, especially if you don't have a tight family background or close friends or a S.O.