431–440 of 586 posts
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That's pretty crappy. Another way to prevent anyone but the founders and investors from capturing any value from the IPO. Instead of selling your shares right after the IPO, couldn't you trade options on those shares in a way that closely simulates selling the underlying equity, and stay within the agreement?
In a word, no. https://blog.wealthfront.com/hedging-stock/
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I agree. I worked for one startup which got bought. The founders made money. All of the employees lost money. One of the founders reached out to me a few years later, asking me to join his new startup as employee #2. I said "yes", but only if I made 10% of what he made. The answer was "No". OK... maybe 1% of what he makes? "No". Thanks, but no thanks. If you admit that you're not going to share the benefits, I have n…
Just to play devil's advocate - as a founder, I've both made money and lost money. Some of my ventures were self-funded to failure and I had to write off hundreds of thousands of dollars. I repeatedly remind my family that my worst case is not a year of unemployment with zero income but rather a year of business failure with a painful amount of red ink. One or two experiences like that and you become very aware of th…
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I hate it because it feels incredibly crusty. Nothing seems to update without hitting F5, there's annoying amount of jargon and poorly named fields everywhere, and in my company it's also tied into everything from client billing to asset management, presumably because it's sold as something that does everything including breakfast, and all that noise seems to permeate into every ticket type (I can't search for a tick…
We have a few tie-ins too, but only for Bitbucket stuff like feature branches and occationally Confluence. What's a better alternative to Jira though?
This has caused me some level of sadness in the past. I worked for a startup (started 6mo after founding with only 20 people and stayed for 8 years to 200+ people and 50million in revenue). During a number of phases, I worked for months at a time giving up weekends, late nights, holidays and even vacation time to get product out the door and beat the competition. I racked up 50k options, mostly all for less than a do…
I now also regained my stamina to work hard and long hours but I know where my red line lies and take it easy when necessary. I also make "enjoyable work" for myself and our employees a priority. Call it naive or stupid but life is too short to slave away without enjoying the day-to-day of it.
It has always baffled me the way founders treat employees and investors so vastly asymmetric. Ive been involved in rounds close enough to see how just the "hint" of a potential investment and all the numbers, financials, cap tables are sent in one big email to their analyst, while some early employees (who controversially have worked just as hard as the founders) have no clue who owns what and whats going on. I get i…
I don't find it baffling. You flatly cannot build a company without capital. On the other hand, you might be able to build a company by treating good employees badly, because the employees are either a little naive or they really do value working at your cool startup over money. You might also be able to simply build a reasonably successful company with not very good employees (in fact this is most companies)
This has caused me some level of sadness in the past. I worked for a startup (started 6mo after founding with only 20 people and stayed for 8 years to 200+ people and 50million in revenue). During a number of phases, I worked for months at a time giving up weekends, late nights, holidays and even vacation time to get product out the door and beat the competition. I racked up 50k options, mostly all for less than a do…
Yep, that's exactly what your management was counting on.
As always the main rule you need to live by is value the equity at zero and you'll be (maybe) happy. Short of being a founder (and thus not really being offered equity) I have never treated these things as anything beyond a minor on paper "bonus". Given you'd be lucky to get anything more than 1% even as a first employee I find them next to worthless as early stage motivators. Which is how everyone seems to play it -…
This advice is often given but it's easier said than done. Let's say you work at a unicorn for 3 years and in that time it goes up 10x in VC fantasy land valuation. On paper you have a lot of money and the company reasonably might go public a couple years after you leave. Let's say you're granted about a year's salary in shares when you first join so you've vested $100K for a round number. When you leave that equity…
I was so naive when I joined my first startup. When we were purchased, it came to light that the main guy never got around to signing my stock option agreement. He is a fucking mensch and signed it after the fact. Character buys a unique, abiding respect.
At my first startup, the share option terms and conditions had a clause allowing the company to arbitrarily change any condition in the contract. Of course we signed it and didn't think much about it. At the IPO this clause was very predictably used to extend all the employees'[1] vesting schedule to many years after the IPO event. By that time the options were worthless because the company was acquired in a fire sal…
[1] https://dangelo.quora.com/10-Year-Exercise-Periods-Make-Sens...
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Care to give a citation there? I'm quite certain you are wrong; there's no reason your employer can't withhold X% of your RSU at vesting time for taxes. In practice all this "really" means is they don't give you the full amount and send the equivalent dollar amount to the IRS instead.
It seems like this would be a very costly alternative for a company since it would essentially be a commitment to buy back 30-40% of outstanding RSU's at the equivalent price (current 409A valuation?). Over time I'd imagine this would become a major drain on cash reserves. Google, Facebook, Netflix etc. can do this easily since they can just sell the RSU shares on the public market. It's the illiquidity of the shares…