Viewing profile — samclearman

Not sure what you mean by "should" here, but the IRS definitely considers it to be a gain that you have to pay taxes on, regardless of whether you can sell the shares.

RSU's are taxed on vesting, so it would be worse than options if anything. Best are options with early exercise, but they're still not perfect (you have a possibly significant upfr…

Yes, it's common. They'll say that it's because they don't want unapproved investors on their cap table, which I guess is reasonable, but obviously the main reason is "because they…

Because the system is crazy, but it only affects early employees of successful startups so there's no political will to fix it.

In this case, the way it works is: 1. You exercise your options, for a paper gain of millions of dollars 2. However, you can't actually sell the shares (there are likely contractua…

Hey all! I actually made this years ago and never shared it because whenever I was about to, I'd always discover one little thing that I wanted to change. Anyway, it's a Tetris var…

https://medium.com/@samclearman/stop-paying-for-e-books-and-...

The article is about the 18th and 19th centuries.

I work at Scale - I've met a bunch of people that work on our platform, and seeing the impact that it's had on their lives is actually a huge source of inspiration to me. There's a…

Most Americans have spare bedrooms for when guests visit. You could have your guests stay at a hotel but typically that will be really far from your home which sucks for everybody.…

Pricing is per household, so a family of four spends the same as an single individual.

Maybe you never used to spend more than $10/month on video, but most Americans have been spending an order of magnitude more than that.

A la carte TV pricing was always a stupid idea. What people really wanted was cheaper pricing, which is of course not going to happen.

Top students getting offers in California are getting 150k USD minimum (including equity and bonus).

The other, probably more important, innovation was that you have to take the picture at the same time as you send it - no loading from the camera roll.

Well spotted.

Yup and the solution is simple, a land value tax as close to 100% as is practical.

Probably because Firefox is a well known brand and Mozilla isn't.

Presumably the deal terms include a liquidation preference and thus the implied valuation is essentially horseshit.

This stuff is much worse than NSA data collection. Gag orders are evil, and secret courts are even worse. I really wish people would stop worrying about government surveillance - w…

No. All the data that they use is self-reported (when you sign up for health insurance, they ask you if you smoke, etc).

This article is utterly useless without comparisons to the equivalent numbers in other major economies.

This kind of thing is an advantage of Airbnb. Our litigious society has resulted in overly sanitized public spaces - no hotel would have a rope swing on a tree because of safety/li…