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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?

#161

Post by owyn »

tinkerteller wrote: post #155
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.

That's a great question... I don't know!

I have done the "founder" thing once (at #3), and at one point I had to lay off employees that I had just hired. That sucked. I think when I'm just the technical lead, I can work hard on that and let revenue be someone else's problem. Also, most of the companies I've worked for have been founded by people that I know who asked me to come on board and take a senior technical role. Ultimately that's led to relatively low pay and low ownership stakes and a couple of decades of wasted time. So... don't do what I did?

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

#162

Post by [deleted] »

patio11 wrote: post #160
dyeje wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#163

Post by kusha »

Employee # 3 at a startup, my first full time jr dev job. Eventually talked my way into .33% equity.

$6M exit, our shares were bought with the acquiring company's publicly traded shares. Those shares had a 6 month cliff before we could sell them.

~$9 a share at the time of acquisition, ~$4 a share at the end of the 6 months. Sold about 1 year after acquisition for ~$10/share, now at ~$17 a share and climbing.

Made $11k pretax in the end. (+$4k cash gift from founder that got a bigger payout, due to the board not approving more equity for employees pre-acquisition)

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

#164

Post by countryqt30 »

#1: 500k (1 year) #2: 840k (1 year) #3: 2.8M (1.5 years)

I always joined as employee #1, and interviewed literally 100s of startups before making a choice, and then only joined when there was a clear MVP and "an idea of product market fit with incredibly strong proof."

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

#165

Post by pascalxus »

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 assuming you have job offers at established companies. If a start up is all you can get, then there's no tradeoff.

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

#166

Post by mailshanx »

patio11 wrote: post #160
dyeje wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you know if there are any other markets other than the USA where a competent (but not necessarily celebrity-famous) dev can make 300-400k a year?

For many good devs, immigrating to the USA is close to impossible in these times. Would be nice to know if these kinds of salaries are attainable outside the states.

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

#167

Post by jasonkester »

mailshanx wrote: post #166
patio11 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you know if there are any other markets other than the USA where a competent (but not necessarily celebrity-famous) dev can make 300-400k a year? For many good devs, immigrating to the USA is close to impossible in these times. Would be nice to know if these kinds of salaries are attainable outside the states.

Plenty of those American companies hire remote developers. I spent several years working for them here in France and the UK, for market compensation as measured at the Bay Area companies being discussed here.

Some places will try to pay you less based on your location. You can't blame them for trying, but you don't have to accept their first offer, either. The market is really good now.

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

#168

Post by brogrammernot »

rpm33 wrote: post #91
brogrammernot wrote: post #45

Startup 1: $0 Startup 2: $0 Startup 3: Would’ve made ~$40k had I not left so early (left after 7 months, sold for a couple hundred million like 6 months later) Startup 4: Publicly traded now, will see how it turns out but hopefully $100k or more Overall, simply bank on it being nothing

what equity % did you get ?

At the now public company, it wasn’t a %, but just a grant mix of options post IPO and a grant of RSUs as well because of some funny timing with the IPO.

I only planned on staying a year before moving so I didn’t negotiate any stock into the initial comp package, but later re-negotiated that into the plan which resulted in the weird timing around IPO so have a weird mix of options and RSUs.

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

#169

Post by nojvek »

pm90 wrote: post #146
nojvek wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even 4 years at FANG with million in savings is laughable. You gotta be pretty high up the ladder. It is definitely not the average.

Actually an initial grant of 600K in RSU's in a FAANG would probably net that much with 4 years of rapid growth in stock price. And don't forget the cash component isn't peanuts either.

Is 600K RSUs a normal thing? I’m guessing it’s only for senior+ engineers only.

That’s a ridiculous amount of money. Microsoft feels very stingy if this is the normal.

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

#170

Post by taysic »

deanmoriarty wrote: post #151
taysic wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting thanks - is this something recent that has changed? I don't get the sense that this was how it was even 4-5 years ago. Do you think these salaries are sustainable?
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