Why I will not exercise my GitLab stock options
1–10 of 211 posts
Re: Why I will not exercise my GitLab stock options
#2smh .. cmon gitlab, wtf
Re: Why I will not exercise my GitLab stock options
#3Glad I read this before we plunged into EE. It will please the Trello lovers.
Re: Why I will not exercise my GitLab stock options
#4Glad I read this before we plunged into EE. It will please the Trello lovers.
Make sure you look at Phabricator, too. It's great and the dev team is highly professional.
Has a Trello-like work board, good project management and - most importantly - a sane and highly optimized workflow that works very well for a number of large companies and open source projects.
I'll just link to another comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13939608
Happy to answer any questions! (give it a few hours though)
Re: Why I will not exercise my GitLab stock options
#5Anyone who just cares about the numbers: he was given options of 45,000 shares, of which 15,000 had vested. These 15,000, or 0.0833% of the company, were available to him at $0.27/share, or $4,050 total. So he had the opportunity to buy 0.0833% of the company at a $4.8MM valuation. Given that they recently raised $20MM at an undefined valuation it really says something that he chose not to exercise the options. I really recommend you all read the post.
Also, damn, that email from the CEO about his private Twitter. That's completely out of line.
For those of you that didn't read the article, the CEO called him out about a specific tweet (on a personal account with only 146 followers) where he linked to GitLab's page on Github for crying out loud.
(also, curious note: this comment went from 4 points to zero in less than five minutes. Hmmmm.)
Re: Why I will not exercise my GitLab stock options
#6This presents a question I've had for a while. Suppose I want a small number of units (say the 15000 he has here) in a company that's pre-IPO, is there a standardized agreement for me to buy it from him?
While his past employer probably has right of first refusal on the units, wouldn't he still come out ahead if I wanted to pay him, say, $10000 for the 15000 units?
Could they have legally pre-emptively blocked the sale? Are there standard agreements where I could take ownership of the value behind those units without having full ownership or voting rights?
Re: Why I will not exercise my GitLab stock options
#7Anyone who just cares about the numbers: he was given options of 45,000 shares, of which 15,000 had vested. These 15,000, or 0.0833% of the company, were available to him at $0.27/share, or $4,050 total. So he had the opportunity to buy 0.0833% of the company at a $4.8MM valuation. Given that they recently raised $20MM at an undefined valuation it really says something that he chose not to exercise the options. I rea…
> Damn, that email from the CEO about his private Twitter. That's completely out of line.
It regarded his professional work on GitLab: https://twitter.com/suprnova32/status/720396175954698240
I think it's completely appropriate that he link instead to GitLab for such a thing, and I think it's remarkable that he didn't think the same. This isn't like the ad world, where if your customer is Coke you can't be seen drinking a Pepsi in public (which I agree is crazy): he was posting about GitLab itself, linking to their GitHub mirror instead of to their own site, which completely undermines the GitLab position.
Re: Why I will not exercise my GitLab stock options
#8This presents a question I've had for a while. Suppose I want a small number of units (say the 15000 he has here) in a company that's pre-IPO, is there a standardized agreement for me to buy it from him? While his past employer probably has right of first refusal on the units, wouldn't he still come out ahead if I wanted to pay him, say, $10000 for the 15000 units? Could they have legally pre-emptively blocked the sa…
Usually companies have a clause where they have the first right to buy the stock options back before you offer them for sale to anyone else. Employee stock options are sort of intended to be NODROP, and if they want to make shares available on like second market, they need to create a pool of shares specifically for that.
Re: Why I will not exercise my GitLab stock options
#9I didnt really see anything here of any real substance, other than OP strangely thinks that twitter is private, and that the CEO rightly advised him to link to their own product instead of their competitors. I cant really see how thats a "run in" with the CEO.
All the other cultural issues he seems to bemoaning are all consequences of growth in a startup. Information flow gets harder with more people.
As far as the CMO moving on to github, that certainly doesn't seem to be all that sinister of an indictment. If you have experience in marketing a developer tool to developers and software businesses, you're probably going to leverage that experience getting a job marketing a developer tool to developers and software businesses.
The one thing he's likely right about is that there probably isnt enough market to actually chase, github has a huge piece of it already and hasn't been able to liquidate, so its not obvious where their growth is going to come from besides eating away githubs marketshare. But thats probably why they seem to be pivoting more towards a holistic tool set that is bigger than version control (like the atlassian example). But only time, execution, and a whole lot of luck with show how it all pans out.
Re: Why I will not exercise my GitLab stock options
#10I didnt really see anything here of any real substance, other than OP strangely thinks that twitter is private, and that the CEO rightly advised him to link to their own product instead of their competitors. I cant really see how thats a "run in" with the CEO. All the other cultural issues he seems to bemoaning are all consequences of growth in a startup. Information flow gets harder with more people. As far as the C…
>As far as the CMO moving on to github
I think the implication was the CMO was fired and that was a poor decision, highlighted by her being snapped up by their competitor.