About a year ago, I published an article about a company I invested in: Athyna.

Part breakdown, part investment thesis.

Then, 6 months ago I published a follow-up interview going back-and-forth with founder and CEO Bill Kerr on one aspect of Athyna that I find absolutely fascinating: their culture.

To give a sense of why I begged Bill to share his philosophy on culture specifically - Athyna has the highest employee engagement metrics I’ve ever seen… and they are 100% remote.

^{The interview popped off.}

Fast-forward to today, I’ve pulled Bill back into the hot-seat. This time with a practical deep dive on exactly how he architected Athyna’s benefits program to achieve ‘negative churn’ (more returners than leavers).

Let’s get into it.

— Tom

P.S. I made my first hire through Athyna, and the experience was so flawless that I invested in the company. If you’re looking to hire global talent, and want to benefit from a partner with culture at its core, click here.

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Benefits that print retention

Chess Move

The what: A TLDR explanation of the strategy

Hey there, my name is Bill Kerr, people call me Doc (like, Doctor), and I am here to talk to you about how we at my startup, Athyna, built a benefits program that is hard to beat in startup and technology land worldwide.

As someone who personally values their time pretty highly (as I am sure you do too)I’d like to explain why I have, as Ray Dalio would put it, an exceptionally high ‘believability rating’ when it comes to this stuff. In other words, why you should listen to me.

Athyna is a remote-first organisation. We have ~60 people across nearly every continent, and for the last four years or so, we have conducted quarterly engagement surveys, with an average score of 90/100 across this period.

An 80% engagement score is considered excellent, so how I usually frame it when recruiting new hires is that we ‘oscillate somewhere between excellence and perfection.’

Oh, and last quarter it was 94%. So we know what we are doing with this stuff. And our world-class benefits plan is a large part of it. So let’s dive into it!

A look inside a culture and the benefit moat

Most companies treat benefits as a compliance cost. Athyna treats them as a growth engine. That framing shift is worth real money: an 90% employee-engagement score beats that of the world’s best-run firms.

By stacking three unusually generous perks (full-rate parental leave, broad-based RSUs, and a pre-tax employee investment fund) Athyna turns ‘total comp’ into negative-churn (we have nearly as many employees return as leave) infrastructure that both keeps talent and frees capital for growth.

The most popular employee perks

Every year, HR teams trot out an ever-longer list of ‘perks,’ but only a handful actually move the needle on morale and retention. According to the Society for Human Resource Management’s latest survey, the six benefits below are the ones employees say they’d fight hardest to keep. Think of them as the baseline expectations; if you’re not at least in this set, you’re already negotiating from behind.

Strategy playbook

Athyna’s benefits filter is simple: Will this perk create more enterprise value than it costs? If the answer is yes, we launch it and optimise later. We offer a range of great benefits, but the Holy Trio at Athyna is as follows.

1.  Parental leave that actually covers parenthood

Childbirth is the single biggest trigger of voluntary female turnover in tech. Athyna decided to compete on compassion: 24 weeks of full-rate leave for birth parents and 20 weeks for partners. Comparable companies in the U.S. offer zero paid weeks; the OECD median is 14.

The thread exploded with love, evidence that flexibility isn’t just policy, it’s lived practice. No forms, no guilt. Since the programme went live in 2022, Athyna hasn’t lost a single new parent.

2. Equity for everyone, not just executives

Henry Ford once doubled Detroit factory wages to cut turnover; modern tech companies try the same trick with stock options. The problem? Options feel like Monopoly money after employees see exercise bills and 90-day post-employment clocks. We took a different route: 20% of the fully-diluted cap table reserved for employees and issued as RSUs. No one pays a cent up front, and a double-trigger clause defers taxes until cash is in hand.

Carta’s 2025 data shows why that decision ages well. In seed-stage companies, RSUs make up almost 0% of employee grants; by Series F, they’re 37% of the mix, crowding out options as firms mature. In other words: the bigger the company, the more it leans on RSUs (the instrument we gave everyone from day one).

Result on the ground? Our offer-acceptance rate jumped from 68% to 91% after we rolled out the RSU pool, and the ownership mindset that follows is priceless: 78% of the team submitted at least one cost-saving or revenue idea last year. Create value, and you share in value.

The RSU pool was baked in on day 1, not bolted on later. Early hires didn’t just “get lucky”, they were invited to share upside from the moment we opened our laptops.

3. A pre-tax investment plan that beats the market

Professor Scott Galloway diverts part of his salary from Vox (the owner of the IP from his Pivot podcast) into an internal investment program that the company offers. “Pre-tax dollars compound faster,” he tells anyone who will listen. And he’s right. At Athyna, employees can divert 2–15% of their gross salary into a company note that pays a fixed 10% pre-tax yield, distributed quarterly.

The maths on this is simple but elegant: A $1,000 deferral becomes $1,000 invested and earns $100 in interest. Contrast that against the alternative: $700 invested (post-30% taxation) into a standard index fund that returns an average of 7% per year. Your return is 49% in the latter example. Athyna’s program returns more than double a typical return someone would achieve.

One-third of the staff opted in within six months. And the kicker is, Athyna now funds a meaningful slice of working capital at 10%, beating venture debt quotes of 13–18%. The team wins, + Athyna wins.

4. Bidirectional benefits in practice

Generous perks rarely live in isolation. SHRM’s 2025 survey links robust benefits with 31% lower turnover, 13% higher output, and 75% fewer sick days. That same survey also found that 26.3% of employees named greater work flexibility as the single biggest driver of job satisfaction, underscoring why our parental leave and remote-first policies crack at Athyna. 

Our data echoes the pattern: a 9% engagement score and an employer brand flywheel that pulls in top-of-funnel candidates at zero cost.

Summary

Benefits aren’t soft perks; they’re hard-edged infrastructure. When leave policies wipe out regrettable churn, equity turns every employee into an owner, and a pre-tax fund doubles both wealth and working capital, you’re no longer ‘competing for talent’ - you’re compounding it.

Athyna’s experience is a reminder that culture scales best when it’s written straight into the P&L. Copy the principle, not just the perks, and your own moat will start digging itself.

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That’s all for today’s guest post - hope you enjoyed!

See ya next week ✌️

— Tom

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