471–480 of 586 posts
What did I learn? Start your own company is best. second best is to license a trademark or a patent to the startup to ensure that you are square in the center of the equity pie. YMMV
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Thanks for validating that this scheme is not crazy! I have a follow-up question though. Every time a new employee joins, you are essentially shelling out the cash equivalent of their equity's FMV. This way, the offered equity is twice as expensive for you - once as equity itself, but then again as the cash bonus. Has this caused problems for your cash position? Is it sustainable as Scalyr grows into higher valuation…
It's cash-neutral for us. Suppose a new hire gets 10,000 options with a strike price of $1.00. (These are not real numbers.) They will pay $10,000 up front to early-exercise the options. We give them a bonus of $10,000. Net cash impact to us: zero. (As I noted, there is some cash impact to the new hire, as they will have to report $10,000 income and pay taxes on it.) We've lost the opportunity to earn a little money…
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Don't spend the money before you have it in your account. It's easy to get lured into the idea that the paper money is real ("worst case, it's worth 25% of that and it's still millions!"). There are still so very many things that can wipe that out, if not to zero, to something that isn't even close to life-changing money. Easier said than done, but really the best thing to do is focus on your current work / life. Kee…
I haven't let it affect decisions like buying a new car. I've been looking at some houses, but just for fun. I've been working on some of my own startups since I quit this job. I needed to keep my burn-rate low, so I lived in some very cheap countries in South America, South-east Asia, and/or Europe. Basically the "digital nomad" thing, except I didn't move around very much. And then I somehow managed to find a long-…
Would you mind if I picked your brain on which countries/cities you'd recommend? I've found info online (e.g. internet speeds listed on nomadlist) to contradict my real world findings, so would be great to get some first hand info.
Can you email me at hello.hnthrowaway@mailhero.io? If you'd prefer me to get in touch another way let me know. Or even a reply here would be hugely useful.
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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…
Interestingly, one person's time can be worth more than another person's money. For founders, this is sometimes factored in, but usually not for employees, even when they take a reduced salary. At best, if you are taking a 100k job for 50k, you are, in the eyes of most founders, only investing 50k in the company. But if you are putting in beyond 2k hours that year, anything beyond that is an investment and can be wor…
It's not just the time, but the experience and skill of one person can be immensely more valuable than someone else's experience and skill.
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8 years of weekends, late nights, holidays and vacation for a net of $200K after taxes? That's ~25K/year so if you would've worked a regular 40 hour week, 20 hours of contract work at anything more than $35/hour would have put you ahead. And you would've still had weekends, nights and vacation.
Yeah, that's the calculation that bums me out too. It's one of the reasons I am somewhat loathe to ever put in too much "extra" time anymore. I enjoy being a part of a startup for more than just the lottery ticket aspect, I enjoy creating things from scratch, etc. But the days of burning the candle at midnight are gone.
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Yeah, that's the calculation that bums me out too. It's one of the reasons I am somewhat loathe to ever put in too much "extra" time anymore. I enjoy being a part of a startup for more than just the lottery ticket aspect, I enjoy creating things from scratch, etc. But the days of burning the candle at midnight are gone.
In startups, man exploits man. At other employers, it's the other way around.
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You do realize that this is the exact premise of risk and reward? That company could have been the next Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc, and in those 800-ish days you would have given up for weekends over 8 years you could have earned more than all of your ancestors probably have ever earned in their entire lives. All in a fraction of your single life. And yet, we still get posts like this one, and comments like yours,…
I realize I could have attempted to exercise sooner, but that isn't quite the point. The part that really bugs me is the fact that time is undervalued (or non-valued). If I have a high value asset, my time, that I contribute towards the success of a company, it's value goes severely underappreciated by management and the board. That's the problem. If person X puts in money, and person Y puts in time, the time is rega…
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The tax system was a mess before Intuit existed. I don't see a way to lay the blame at their feet.
Others may messed it up, but Intuit lobbies to keep things that way. Here's their lobbyist's disclosure form. It says "Oppose IRS government tax preparation" right there in Box 16. https://soprweb.senate.gov/index.cfm?event=getFilingDetails&... Their SEC disclosure says essentially the same thing. Grab it from here: http://investors.intuit.com/financial-information/annual-rep... Specifically, on page 10 of the 2016 v…