171–180 of 278 posts
This is the first “employee perspective” criticism of equity incentives I’ve read that makes perfect sense. Hat off for that! :) Sadly in the country where I’ve founded startups (Sweden) the government mandates that the terms must be really shitty, or there are immediate tax consequences that somebody has to swallow.
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You can do this at a public company because the RSUs are liquid. They can be sold at market rate on the stock market, for cash, which is what's given to the government. The government doesn't want your illiquid startup shares.
Can't you postpone the tax to be paid to when actual tradable equity will be delivered?
This hits me right in the tendies. How many times have I had this conversation to no avail
Valid reasons to work for a startup: - You are a cofounder. - You have little experience and you are using this to break into the industry, and get experience on many different technologies ("wear many hats"). - They are working on a very specific problem or using a specific technology that you strongly desire to work on and it's difficult to do it anywhere else. - You want to work a certain way (remote, on the beach…
to add another valid (yet totally invalid) point: You want an impressive job title. At an established company you're going to be a Software Developer or Engineer level n; at a startup you can easily be Lead, Director of or even a VP if that's important to you.
I'd say the extent of actual impact to business relative to the entirety of the business operations probably remains roughly the same between two people with the same title at a large company and a small company. However, the potential loss (or perhaps gain) suffered from poor (or great) decision-making is likely much smaller on an absolute scale at a start-up, although roughly the same on a relative scale.
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>I could be a cog in a giant corporate machine, or I can have a measurable impact where I work. I think that point can support working for either a big company or a small company depending on what type of impact you are looking for. I've worked for startups in the past and have had a huge impact on the startup but almost no impact on the outside world because the startups just weren't tackling very visible problems.…
> I think that point can support working for either a big company or a small company depending on what type of impact you are looking for. For a lot of people, "I want to have an impact where I work" is more about their own ego and sense of importance than about impact on other people's lives. This is not a value judgment, by the way - wanting to feel like more than just another faceless disposable drone is a valid d…
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Same happens in big cos when sometimes hundreds or more engineering years are scrapped purely because of internal political wars or “reorgs”
That's precisely my point. Startup work is not any more meaningful or everlasting than work at a big company. GP claimed PMs at big companies only come up with meaningless work but I think the work is meaningless almost everywhere. Every human needs purpose but pouring yourself into something that is very likely to have so little permanent impact seems foolish. I think there is a desperate call for balance in life wh…
That wasn’t my intended point. I want to be a profit center, not someone you keep busy because you can.
At Google, for example, I’d wanna work on search, ads, or data mining. But I wouldn’t wanna work on chat.
At Uber, I’d wanna work on the driver orchestration machinery, not on some opensource side project they have.
I find at startups it’s easier to get to work on the company’s main core thing. And that’s where I like to be.
If the whole company ultimately proves meaningless, that’s just life.
So founders do treat some of their investors like this - look at every ICO, and a lot of dumb overseas money, and a good number of friends/family/fools rounds. And conversely, there are some employees that they treat with kid gloves, who basically get the investor treatment. Look at executive hires. The difference is basically two letters: "No". Most institutional investors have the ability and inclination to say no…
The problem is that some people need money and can't say no. That's why anybody works for minimum wage... The executives and investors and FAANG engineers have all made good money and seen decent RSU terms, you can't pull the wool over their eyes. Someone who is just getting into tech may be allured by a 50k salary and "1 MILLION OPTIONS!!!!" (There are ten trillion in the option pool). I think engineers would do wel…
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The problem is that some people need money and can't say no. That's why anybody works for minimum wage... The executives and investors and FAANG engineers have all made good money and seen decent RSU terms, you can't pull the wool over their eyes. Someone who is just getting into tech may be allured by a 50k salary and "1 MILLION OPTIONS!!!!" (There are ten trillion in the option pool). I think engineers would do wel…
> Someone who is just getting into tech may be allured by a 50k salary and "1 MILLION OPTIONS!!!!" This reminds me of a job offer from a startup I interviewed with that offered me a specific number of options, but wouldn't tell me anything that I could use to value them, effectively forcing me to value them at $0.