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Why I will not exercise my GitLab stock options

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Re: Why I will not exercise my GitLab stock options

#41

Post by danaliv »

princekolt wrote: post #39
danaliv wrote: post #36

Being publicly critical of a former employer like this, unless you're talking about major ethical issues, seems like a bad move. There's just no way to do it without it coming across as sour grapes. If you have constructive criticism because you believe in a company and want them to do better, give it directly to the people involved. Otherwise I just have to wonder what the real motive is behind making a public state…

> The cherry on top of this disastrous situation was that throughout the entire process I only heard good things from my manager. In total I had 3 1-on-1's with him, and even though we discussed the situation and what was wrong multiple times, he never, for one moment, gave me the impression that my job could be in jeopardy. A few weeks later I was fired. This doesn't look like a company that takes direct criticism s…

Then don't waste your time. The point is, a public post like this reads badly.

Re: Why I will not exercise my GitLab stock options

#42

Post by barce »

danaliv wrote: post #36

Being publicly critical of a former employer like this, unless you're talking about major ethical issues, seems like a bad move. There's just no way to do it without it coming across as sour grapes. If you have constructive criticism because you believe in a company and want them to do better, give it directly to the people involved. Otherwise I just have to wonder what the real motive is behind making a public state…

Yet, at the same time I would think twice before working at gitlab now. I feel the CEO or HR should have had an NDA in place with a generous severance. Also, I would be hesitant about hiring the engineer. He was given a great challenge, but instead of rising to it, he made up excuses about needing mentorship. At the very least, he could've generalized the problem, and made an open source library as leverage for finding an even better job. Yes, he still might've gotten fired, but at least he'd have a tool he could call his own.

Re: Why I will not exercise my GitLab stock options

#43

Post by KingMob »

calcsam wrote: post #26

The GitLab exec team is probably pretty happy to be reading this blog post. Because Patricio isn't exercising his stock options they will return to the option pool, where they are available for re-allocation to new hires. 0.1% of a Series B company is the entire four-year grant for a new engineer, or several sales / operations folks.

Except that the negative PR from the post may well deter qualified applicants in the future, which could easily be worth more than <.1% of the company.

Re: Why I will not exercise my GitLab stock options

#44

Post by mattbee »

danaliv wrote: post #36

Being publicly critical of a former employer like this, unless you're talking about major ethical issues, seems like a bad move. There's just no way to do it without it coming across as sour grapes. If you have constructive criticism because you believe in a company and want them to do better, give it directly to the people involved. Otherwise I just have to wonder what the real motive is behind making a public state…

On the flip-side, never let one of your staff leave your company so unhappy they write a hit-piece.

As a CEO you'll know if your company has been a less-than-great manager to a member of staff. (If don't have lots of written evidence that you've been managing them well ... you've probably been managing them badly.)

This guy is pained he wasn't able to contribute as Gitlab grew. You can't always bring someone round as a company changes shape, but you can be kind & generous if you need to fire them.

Re: Why I will not exercise my GitLab stock options

#45

Post by aquabib »

Everhusk wrote: post #31
zeveb wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 drink…

Why is GitLab even using Github? https://github.com/gitlabhq

Backup.

Re: Why I will not exercise my GitLab stock options

#46

Post by chetanahuja »

lima wrote: post #4
safanycom wrote: post #3

Glad 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 fe…

One of the biggest weaknesses of gitlab, that becomes glaring as you add more and more projects, is that a code repository and a project are considered one and the same thing. It's quite common to want two or more separate repositories for an actual development project (e.g. frontend/backend or client/server etc.).

Of course gitlab's problems arise from the fact that their whole reason for existence is being an open-source copy of github. (And github is designed first and foremost as a public facing opensource management tool... which forces a lot of their product design choices).

Does phabricator work on a different paradigm that's more conducive as an internal tool to manage dev projects for a single organization?

Re: Why I will not exercise my GitLab stock options

#47

Post by hkmurakami »

nandemo wrote: post #38
owenversteeg wrote: post #5

Anyone 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…

> 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 normally don't comment on HN without having read TFA, but this one is way too long and I just skimmed over it…

A $20MM raise suggests a $100M valuation or so. That's a 20x increase in the stock price. OP's outlay would be something like $4000 + $35000 (state tax + short term capital gains. Less depending on how he hits AMT.). I don't think that's trivial, even if I'm off by a factor of 2.

Re: Why I will not exercise my GitLab stock options

#48

Post by cortesoft »

habitue wrote: post #8
arjie wrote: post #6

This 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.

I would be curious about the legality of working around that restriction - like, what if the option holder creates a contract with someone who wants to buy the options, where they agree to hold onto them and then give them to the buyer once they are allowed to in return for a lump sum payment up front. Or, perhaps, they set up an agreement where they are given a lump sum payment up front, and agree to pay the buyer an amount equal to the current value of the stock once it becomes publicly available.

Re: Why I will not exercise my GitLab stock options

#49

Post by DigitalSea »

marcosdumay wrote: post #12

So, Japan also collects taxes on the price of stock you don't sell. Do most countries do this? I always thought it was a US only thing.

Australia does this as well. Tax systems are inherently complicated, I know there are numerous efforts underway to change this aspect but nothing has happened here in Australia nor anywhere else to my knowledge. It is a pretty sucky aspect of taxation law.
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