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As a former Plaid employee with options that vested after I was shitcanned last year, this is some pretty welcome news.
I'm interviewing with them this week. Any advice/warnings I should know going in?
imo it’s hard to shake how awkward it is when everyone around you is rich and you’re being offered a regular salary that is now dictated by Visa HR
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pretty sure this is false, all my accounts are 2FA, and connected to a few different account aggregators (mint, personalcapital, etc) which i am prettty sure all use Plaid. Handles it fine.
My Wells Fargo account uses 2FA, and recently (November 2019) I was unable to connect a service to it through Plaid, getting an error that said my account type was not supported – or something along those lines. They may have fixed it by now, I haven't tried more recently.
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You’re anon, and I was always curious in terms of $$$ how much did you end up with? At what stage did you join and how many options did you get? Very rare to find real data online about this
I'm happy to post these things, without identifying companies. I'm sure you could find them on my resume or linkedin but there'll still be some ambiguity. Company A, 0.05% or 9000+ options vested, IPO, post-lockout sale at net ~$300k, was an early engineering employee Company B, Make sure you do proper tax planning, taxes take an enormous bite, even with long term capital gains.
If your company IPOs they will withhold shares for you. Only thing to watch for is depending on your income they might underwithold. There isn’t much more to it than that.
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Even if they had really shitty agreements I bet they'll see something substantial. Reports are saying it was a 5.3 billion purchase price. That's a lot of money for 400 employees.
Having 400 employees doesn't say much about how equity is distributed, though. E.g., (made up numbers, I know nothing about Plaid's comp specifically) if an employee gets 1 basis point over 4 years, that's 0.01% * $5.3 billion / 4 = $132,500, which combined with a startup salary might land you at around Google L4.
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I'm happy to post these things, without identifying companies. I'm sure you could find them on my resume or linkedin but there'll still be some ambiguity. Company A, 0.05% or 9000+ options vested, IPO, post-lockout sale at net ~$300k, was an early engineering employee Company B, Make sure you do proper tax planning, taxes take an enormous bite, even with long term capital gains.
What do you mean by tax planning? If your company IPOs they will withhold shares for you. Only thing to watch for is depending on your income they might underwithold. There isn’t much more to it than that.
Even if you have RSUs (where taxes are customarily withheld), the company will withhold at the minimum statutory rates, which may not match up with your personal tax bracket.
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It's not a duopoly? In the US, AMEX and Discover aren't that difficult to use, and a fair amount of retailers accept in-house credit accounts and international creditors like JCB and UnionPay. Payment via debit networks is still very common, and low-tech forms of payment such as cash and checks are still acceptable in many use cases.
Visa is 54% of all card purchases, Mastercard is 23%, and together they're 100% of debit purchases. Waaaaaay past any reasonable threshold for market power scrutiny. But antitrust is currently dormant in the USA.
I see a lot of hate for Plaid here. I was my understanding that the only reason you would really ever use Plaid is because they were able give programmatic access to flat-rate fee ACH payments of basically any size. Obviously they were never something you could compare to Stripe. I wonder what's gonna happen with in the near future, especially considering Plaid was obviously stepping on the toes of the interchange-ra…
Plaid provides an api to access transaction history and verify bank account ownership. They don't do ACH transfers.
"""To get started with ACH payments, you need a system that can connect you (the originator of the ACH transaction) with an Originating Depository Financial Institution (ODFI). Additionally, that system should be able to give updates on the status of the payment and give the developer an interface to authenticate, verify, and charge the user on demand.
That’s where Stripe comes in. In January, the payments infrastructure giant debuted support for ACH payments through its platform alongside a partnership with us here at Plaid. Now, Stripe users can authenticate their customers through Plaid (or, if they must, micro-deposits) and then charge them through ACH."""
Am I misunderstanding something?
EDIT:
Okay so maybe they weren't doing the transfers, but they were certainly facilitating them and adding to the adoption of more ACH based payments (which means less credit-card payments). Same conflict of interest applies. What does Visa care about bank account verifications?