"For a good many executives at Kakao's subsidiaries, the goal in life was to retire holding 10 billion won—roughly $7 million—in cash." The line comes from an industry insider with a close view of Kakao, the Korean tech-and-messaging giant. When I first read it, I paused. Is it a bad thing to come to work every day chasing a specific number, or not? The longer I sat with it, the more I saw that the question isn't really about greed. It's one that every founder who builds a team and shares the spoils runs into at some point. What motivates the people who join your team shapes that team far longer than how much you pay them.
The Long-Held Belief That Stock Options Bind a Team Together
Look at how startups share success with their people and you find a wide spectrum—from hiring those who believe in the mission and promising to grow together, to leading with equity or cash to lock in talent. It's hard to call the second approach wrong. Silicon Valley's stock-option culture has bound talent together for decades under the principle that everyone is in the same boat, and many founders accept it as the obvious design. In the startup world, stock options now carry a status well beyond mere convention.
Yet Kakao's case points to a different outcome. As the company grew explosively and promised—or actually paid—its executives enormous rewards, some of them turned their attention away from the company's next move and toward building their personal wealth. The moment 10 billion won became the target, behavior split along a line: had you reached the number, or not? Those who hit it grew risk-averse and worked to protect the status quo; those who hadn't fixated on short-term results. Both groups pushed the question of why the company existed in the first place to the back of their minds.
This is not a pattern unique to Kakao. The same thing repeats across startups at home and abroad. Once early team members receive their equity, they tend to prefer holding steady over taking on new challenges. They take fewer risks, the conversations change, and decisions slow down. Rather than making people work harder, the rewards make them more cautious. Much of what early founders describe as "the energy of the team changed" actually begins right here.
When External Rewards Erode the Motivation Within
Psychologists call this the overjustification effect. It traces back to an experiment run by Mark Lepper and his team at Stanford in 1973. Ask young children why they like drawing and they'll say, "because it's fun." But start handing them a sticker every time they draw, and after a while they draw less—even once the stickers stop. The external reward has crowded out the internal motivation. The adult workplace is no different. Work you once did because you enjoyed it becomes, once a reward is attached, a calculation: what do I get for doing this?
Here it's worth hearing the counterargument first. Defenders of the Silicon Valley model say the problem isn't that the rewards are too large—it's that the terms are poorly designed. Pay out stock awards over a four-year vesting period the way Google or Meta do, tie them tightly to performance, and people focus on long-term growth rather than short-term gain. There's clear merit to the view. Vesting keeps people from leaving easily, and performance links make free-riding hard. There are real cases where a well-designed incentive system held a team together for years.
But this counterargument rests on one premise: that the person receiving the reward is already motivated enough from within. An executive who joins with 10 billion won as the goal from day one will move toward that number whether the vesting period is four years or ten. The design of the terms affects how long someone stays, but it can hardly change the direction they're looking. One investor who has watched Korea's startup ecosystem for years put it this way: "When you look at the teams that survive over the long run, the founder had a problem they wanted to solve that came before the money." Whether rewards follow as a result, or serve as the source of motivation from the start, a team moves in very different directions.
What to Get Clear On Before You Divide the Spoils
If you're a solo operator or an early founder with a team of two to five, this may all sound a bit remote. You may not be at the stage of negotiating equity or designing stock options. But regardless of size, the way you share rewards with collaborators, partners, and outside contributors always needs a design. The compensation relationships formed in the earliest days of a small venture often determine the team's culture years later.
Start by looking at when you promise a reward. Offer it before any result is produced, and the other person works with receiving the reward as the goal. Share it after you've created a result together, and the other person works with creating the next result as the goal. A different order produces a different attitude. Even for the same amount, "gratitude for what we've already made" and "a condition for work still to come" send the other person very different signals.
The same goes for getting clear on meaning before size. For the identical sum of money, "thank you for helping build our company's growth" and "paid per the terms of the contract" are experienced very differently by the person receiving it. When money carries meaning, the relationship endures; when money replaces the contract, the relationship ends the moment that contract does. In a small team, this difference shows up immediately in the quality of the collaboration.
The easiest thing to skip is simply asking the other person why they want to do this work with you. Many founders pour effort into designing the compensation terms but spend less time confirming the other person's motivation. The single question "Why does this work matter to you?" yields more than negotiating the terms of a reward ever will. And if the other person hesitates, that hesitation is itself information.
What makes the Kakao executive's "10 billion won retirement" story striking isn't that it reveals greed. It's that it compresses, into a single image, how a company's culture tilts in a certain direction and then draws a certain kind of person upward. What a founder promises a team first ultimately decides which kind of people end up staying. A reward is both a signal that calls people in and a filter that screens them out.
