Give Them MORE | Andrew Webley

There's been a lot of conversation on social media over the past few months from several of the executives at Bitcoin Treasury companies around management compensation.

Matt Cole at Strive has done several very long posts about his view on it um several you know accounts especially on uh twitter x have been very vocal about what they're happy and unhappy about with different compensation arrangements.

How do you view all of that? How do you view being aligned with shareholders? And is it Bitcoin per share? Can you kind of walk us through just your philosophy on that?

Obviously, I wouldn't want to make a comment about any other companies, but I'm very happy to talk about how we see it at SmarterWeb.

When it first started getting a bit more topical, and in our case, everything's been disclosed, obviously, very, very clearly.

When it first became quite topical, I said to the team, let's put it front and center.

If you go to our Bitcoin analytics page, you can see the board salaries, bonuses, shareholdings, long-term incentives.

It's all on that page at the bottom.

Even though you could have found it all through various different disclosures, we just wanted to make it front and center for everyone.

So the way that I think about it, um, and you know, it's not actually something that I get the final say, and we have a remuneration committee and, and of course I can make suggestions and, you know, lobby effectively, but, you know, we have a committee made up of independent non-executive directors, experienced independent non-executive directors that are that decide those decisions with advice from the advisors and comments from me and the rest of the team.

But I think that what we've done as a company has really aligned us with shareholders.

We've never given any free shares to anyone in the team.

That may change in the future if we do a different share incentive scheme.

Maybe we'll do some sort of an option scheme because we've got a lot of people now in our combined businesses, 35 people approximately, a relatively modest amount of shares for every employee.

It probably wouldn't even be above a percentage of all of the shares in issue, mainly over the long term.

So we might do something like that in the future, which is effectively doing auctions or a different type of scheme.

We do have a long-term incentive plan.

That's incredibly well aligned with the shareholders because the milestones are vast.

I think the first share price one is something like five pounds.

And the first market cap one is 10X where we are at the moment, two and a half billion pounds.

So that's a very modest amount of shares for different people in the team.

Again, it's all been disclosed.

And then on top of that, what we have is we have a salary and a bonus structure for everyone.

The bonus is linked into KPIs, internal KPIs, and also discretion, because it's not just about paying someone.

It's also about retaining someone and motivating someone to get the best out of them for the next year, as well as the year that we've just had.

There's been a lot of conversation on social media over the past few months from several of the executives at Bitcoin Treasury companies around management compensation.

Matt Cole at Strive has done several very long posts about his view on it um several you know accounts especially on uh twitter x have been very vocal about what they're happy and unhappy about with different compensation arrangements.

How do you view all of that? How do you view being aligned with shareholders? And is it Bitcoin per share? Can you kind of walk us through just your philosophy on that?

Obviously, I wouldn't want to make a comment about any other companies, but I'm very happy to talk about how we see it at SmarterWeb.

When it first started getting a bit more topical, and in our case, everything's been disclosed, obviously, very, very clearly.

When it first became quite topical, I said to the team, let's put it front and center.

If you go to our Bitcoin analytics page, you can see the board salaries, bonuses, shareholdings, long-term incentives.

It's all on that page at the bottom.

Even though you could have found it all through various different disclosures, we just wanted to make it front and center for everyone.

So the way that I think about it, um, and you know, it's not actually something that I get the final say, and we have a remuneration committee and, and of course I can make suggestions and, you know, lobby effectively, but, you know, we have a committee made up of independent non-executive directors, experienced independent non-executive directors that are that decide those decisions with advice from the advisors and comments from me and the rest of the team.

But I think that what we've done as a company has really aligned us with shareholders.

We've never given any free shares to anyone in the team.

That may change in the future if we do a different share incentive scheme.

Maybe we'll do some sort of an option scheme because we've got a lot of people now in our combined businesses, 35 people approximately, a relatively modest amount of shares for every employee.

It probably wouldn't even be above a percentage of all of the shares in issue, mainly over the long term.

So we might do something like that in the future, which is effectively doing auctions or a different type of scheme.

We do have a long-term incentive plan.

That's incredibly well aligned with the shareholders because the milestones are vast.

I think the first share price one is something like five pounds.

And the first market cap one is 10X where we are at the moment, two and a half billion pounds.

So that's a very modest amount of shares for different people in the team.

Again, it's all been disclosed.

And then on top of that, what we have is we have a salary and a bonus structure for everyone.

The bonus is linked into KPIs, internal KPIs, and also discretion, because it's not just about paying someone.

It's also about retaining someone and motivating someone to get the best out of them for the next year, as well as the year that we've just had.