Tech startup Stripe offers $20,000 bonus, with 10% pay cut, to workers opting to make remote work permanent and they gobble it up

Silicon Valley startup Stripe offered workers a $20,000 bonus to continue working from home, and they’ve gobbled it up — even though they also had to eat a 10% pay cut.

The offer during the pandemic enticed employees living in high-cost cities such as New York and San Francisco who might want to relocate to lower-cost areas. The company handles payments for the likes of Amazon, Booking.com, Lyft, Deliveroo, Shopify, Salesforce and Facebook, according to Wired.

It was not immediately clear why a company valuated at $95 billion and pegged as the most valuable startup in the U.S. would need its employees to take a compensation cut. Nonetheless, a large number of the employees took up Stripe’s offer.

“We saw pretty major uptake,” Stripe co-founder and president John Collison told Bloomberg on Tuesday. “There were a lot of people where they took advantage of all the remote working that was going on last year to be able to move to be closer to their families, to somewhere they wanted to move previously.”

Stripe has pioneered remote work since 2013, Bloomberg said. That’s when the firm, headquartered in Dublin and San Francisco, began hiring work-from-home engineers, Bloomberg noted.