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Ask HN: How much did you, as an employee, make when your startup exited?

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Re: Ask HN: How much did you, as an employee, make when your startup exited?

#151

Post by deanmoriarty »

taysic wrote: post #147
deanmoriarty wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got an offer from Netflix for 450k cash and another offer from FB for 210k cash with 600k equity over 4 years, a few years ago. Considering how well those stocks did after such offers were made to me, and how frugal I am (avid minimalist spending Also, the 1M from the startup wasn’t net, but gross (taxed at long term capital gain luckily).

So how many years of experience are required for these types of salaries? What job title?

In my case, the title was software engineer, at the time I had 6 years of experience and BS + MS in computer engineering. The offer at FB was for level E5, and I negotiated decently. I’m a very average engineer with average accomplishments, truly nothing special.

Re: Ask HN: How much did you, as an employee, make when your startup exited?

#152

Post by tinkerteller »

rubicon33 wrote: post #59
deanmoriarty wrote: post #58

Joined among the first 10 employees. The company grew to 200 employees and 400M valuation in 4 years. Sold last year a portion of my vested shares for 1M to investors as part of a secondary transaction, and I still have a decent amount (70%) of vested shares and unvested options, since the company hasn’t exited yet and management has no plan of doing so in the short/medium term. I’m not counting on the rest of the eq…

Seriously? 4 years at FAANG would net you $1,000,000 savings? That seems... crazy. Can someone explain how that works? Your salary alone living in the bay area, definitely isn't goin to net you $1,000,000 in savings.

Depends on what career stage you are and what you will be doing. If you have 5-10 years of experience and doing distributed computing/info retrieval/AI then $1M worth of RSUs over 4 years is VERY normal and totally expected by everyone I know.

Re: Ask HN: How much did you, as an employee, make when your startup exited?

#153

Post by tinkerteller »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #87
mooman219 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like the Founders had to have made some poor/greedy decisions if even employee #1 didn't see anything.

As someone who has been on the purchasing side of one of these transactions, that's not really the case. What usually happens is, say the company has received $x million in funding. Everyone is plugging away working hard, but runway starts to run short and the product isn't getting the traction originally anticipated. At that point it looks obvious the company will go bankrupt relatively soon, so the investors push f…

Thanks for the insight. I had guessed that most of the aquihires price are set at (investments + $500K/employee). If this wasn't the case, I would think that employees would have no incentive to get onboard and that would basically not allow the sale to go through. Is this not the case in your experience?

Re: Ask HN: How much did you, as an employee, make when your startup exited?

#154

Post by gt2 »

tinkerteller wrote: post #148
pascalxus wrote: post #35

I'm a senior software engineer with over 12 years of experience. 6 out 7 start ups I worked for never had a liquidation event that resulted in any monetary gain. The one that did ( i was employee #97 and worked there for almost 6 years) and they finally had a 2ndary offer which allowed me to sell 15% of my shares, for about 7K, but because it's short term gains, about 4K is what I got after taxes. The rest of the sha…

Your argument is not making sense to me as someone who had offers from startups. I was asked to take roughly 40% pay cut now and expect 10X increase in valuation for equity over 4 years which would put me ahead by 2X to 3X in terms of total compensation over that time frame. I didn't took the offer taking to account risk of failure (~80%). If I treated options as "nice bonus" it would never make sense to take any sta…

That's why people say look at them like lottery tickets. There's many factors that go into whether or not they are worth anything - dilution and whether or not the startup is successful. The successful startup part needs good management, good demand for product, competitive against competitors.

> I was asked to take roughly 40% pay cut now and expect 10X increase

Of course you were. They are selling you on the dream, the best case scenario, etc. The hard part is that no-one is intentionally or literally defrauding, but it is up to every person what terms they agree to.

Re: Ask HN: How much did you, as an employee, make when your startup exited?

#155

Post by tinkerteller »

owyn wrote: post #142

This is pretty late, but I was feeling retrospective on a sunday evening so let's see... the tldr; #0 = 0 #1 = 0, ~500k options on day 1 eventually underwater and unexercised #2 = 0 #3 = 25k #4 = 0, but left unexercised options that were worth 500k about 8 years later #5 = 0 #6 = 100k with additional options exercised and held #7 = current gig, tbd Background: I'm a software developer first, a good architect and team…

I really have only one question... why did you kept doing more startups as employee? I totally understand people doing this as a founder but just don't get it otherwise.

Re: Ask HN: How much did you, as an employee, make when your startup exited?

#156

Post by gammateam »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #88
gammateam wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Started with 15% but got diluted to 1% after several rounds of funding including down rounds. haha WOW oh my god, and the software engineers getting a fraction of a fraction of a percent and being "reassured" that its a generous offer! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I

While I don't disagree with your comment much (if the technical cofounder was diluted down to 1%, guessing pretty much all employees received well under $100k), it's weird that you linked to that "tech bubble" video from 2007 . If anything, Peter Thiel was exactly right, and he understood that winner-take-all tech leaders would become insanely valuable. That video is arguing 2007 Facebook was a bubble at a $15 billio…

the video is linked for the "pay developers a fraction of a fraction of a pie" line in the catchy song

extremely relevant and the 2007, in italics for emphasis, is irrelevant ... or is it timeless

Peter Thiel? yeah I'm going to go with "'Missed the Point', for $10,000"

Re: Ask HN: How much did you, as an employee, make when your startup exited?

#157

Post by SZJX »

rubicon33 wrote: post #61
civility wrote: post #56

First startup, I traded nearly all of my salary over four years for stock options: $0 Second startup, I was told I'd get 5% of the company (no contract though). I quit after a year without pushing the topic: $0 Third job was not a startup, but it was a fairly small company, and I've made nearly two million in tax deferred accounts having made a healthy salary the entire time. I'm retiring this year. I learned a lot o…

"Third job was not a startup, but it was a fairly small company, and I've made nearly two million in tax deferred accounts" I would love to know how. Am I just stupid? How am I missing these opportunities? Someone above posted that 4 years at FAANG would net you $1,000,000 savings. And you're saying that a "fairly small" company netted you $2,000,000 savings? I am failing at life, apparently.

He never specified how many years he worked there, and he's apparently already retiring? Maybe that's over a very long period of time so I don't see how you're "failing". Maybe you're actually doing much better.

Re: Ask HN: How much did you, as an employee, make when your startup exited?

#158

Post by rasikjain »

aws_ls wrote: post #93

I joined a company which had already IPO'd, 1 year before I joined. And had had 14 years of its runway. They gave me some options, which would mature in 5 years. During that period, the stock exploded. Which the company founders, themselves never expected, else they would have given off much less to employees. Some other employees who had the stock matured, sold it. They gave me stock options worth 300 $ but it incre…

hi aws_ls, thanks for sharing. Is there a way to contact you. my email is in the profile. Thanks :-)

Re: Ask HN: How much did you, as an employee, make when your startup exited?

#159

Post by 666lumberjack »

tinkerteller wrote: post #148
pascalxus wrote: post #35

I'm a senior software engineer with over 12 years of experience. 6 out 7 start ups I worked for never had a liquidation event that resulted in any monetary gain. The one that did ( i was employee #97 and worked there for almost 6 years) and they finally had a 2ndary offer which allowed me to sell 15% of my shares, for about 7K, but because it's short term gains, about 4K is what I got after taxes. The rest of the sha…

Your argument is not making sense to me as someone who had offers from startups. I was asked to take roughly 40% pay cut now and expect 10X increase in valuation for equity over 4 years which would put me ahead by 2X to 3X in terms of total compensation over that time frame. I didn't took the offer taking to account risk of failure (~80%). If I treated options as "nice bonus" it would never make sense to take any sta…

>If I treated options as "nice bonus" it would never make sense to take any startup offer over jobs at established companies.

It doesn't, from a financial perspective.

Re: Ask HN: How much did you, as an employee, make when your startup exited?

#160

Post by patio11 »

dyeje wrote: post #125
deanmoriarty wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you are doubting the information I wrote in the previous comment, suggesting the parent poster to not necessarily believe them, is disturbing. I can only say I truly got those packages and I’m an average engineer. I suggest you ask to the close friends you have working at FAANG if those are true.

First of all, I didn't read your previous comment and you are not the parent post of the comment I replied to. I am sorry you are 'disturbed' by my skepticism of random people on the internet, but I don't have friends working at FAANG so all I have to go off is my own experience and publicly available info. Based on those, I find it hard to believe how many people here post that they make 500k+.

Hiya Dyeje. My name is Patrick. I was previously the CEO of a recruiting startup, have many friends who work at AppAmaGooBookSoft, and am broadly considered credible on HN. I do not work at AppAmaGooBookSoft and my financial exposure to them is denominated in probably tens of dollars; to the extent I am biased here, my incentives are to convince people to not take their offers.

AppAmaGooBookSoft do, indeed, pay deep into the six figures. Each of them has an engineering ladder, where promotions start off like promotions in grade school. If you're not fired, you make it to level X. (They don't fire many people.) The offer at X is, depending on negotiation skill, phases of the moon, perceived competition (particularly on the initial offer stage), and slight variations in performance, about $450k.

There are promotions available after X. People get them, approximately daily.

There are many people for whom it is not in their interest to tell you this, because it will make their offers or proposed life plans less attractive by comparison. There are many HNers who prefer ignoring reality on this issue, sometimes out of jealousy, sometimes out of pride, or sometimes out of believing that they can reason from first principles what Google should pay a Senior Software Engineer and therefore ignore what Google does pay a Senior Software Engineer.

These people are wrong. The market prints the deals where the market prints the deals.

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