Dan Price and his friend Valerie went on hiking in the Cascade mountains that tower over Seattle. As they were walking in the woods, Valerie told Dan about how her life was total chaos. She discusses how her landlord had increased the rent her struggle to manage all her other bills. Dan got furious about the situation, as he was concerned about Valerie. After all, he had dated her in the past. And out of respect for Valerie who had serviced for 11 years in the military.
She is somebody for whom service, honor and hard work just defines who she is as a person,” he told Hiptoro. Even though Valerie was earning around $40,000 a year, in Seattle that wasn’t enough to afford a decent home.
Dan, who on the other hand is a millionaire. He set up his company, Gravity Payments when he was a teenager. With 2,000 customers and was estimated to be worth millions of dollars, the company was a big success. His earning was estimated to be $1.1M a year, but Valerie really made Dan realize that a lot of his staff might be struggling. So he set out to change that.
He was reading a paper when stumbled upon a few life which made him realize that an additional income can help in a person’s emotional well-being. So, Dan decided to increase the salary of his 120 employees and started paying them $70,000.
“People are starving or being laid off or being taken advantage of, so that somebody can have a penthouse at the top of a tower in New York with gold chairs,” Dan said. “We’re glorifying greed all the time as a society, in our culture. And, you know, the Forbes list is the worst example – ‘Bill Gates has passed Jeff Bezos as the richest man.’ Who cares!?”
What I got back in return was better than anything I could have ever imagined, and was truly exciting and shocking in some ways,” he told the afore-criticized Forbes. “What I got back in return is, we went from instead of having zero first-time homeowners per year, now we have many first-time homeowners here at Gravity, and that is so exciting to me.”
He further added “I can’t think of anything better that I could get in return out of it than that, and that’s the impact. That’s the legacy. Because, those babies, they carry with them almost infinite potential, solving some of the existential crises of humanity, curing cancer, solving things like global warming. You name it. Who knows what those babies are going to do, and probably I won’t be around to find out all the cascading effects that will come from that.”
His tweets sparked an important discussion on the way companies treat their employees
