101–110 of 379 posts
Has anyone here made significant (2x exercise price) amounts from stock options at a non-unicorn in the last 5 years?
Significant is $, not %. 10% of $1M beats 100% of $10k. Why would you expect options to pay big for a non-unicorn? Unicorn means the startup investment succeeded in its goal. No one gets rich when their investment fails.
I had never considered it this way in the past, but in the 70’s, productivity started decoupling massively from productivity gains.
I.e. the best people at finance (meritocracy) figured out how to capture all the new earnings relative to the workers (who didn’t know this game was going on).
This has snowballed into a situation where the financial meritocracy is competing with itself and could now never imagine a situation where non-finance people are being paid more in proportion with their value relative to baseline productivity gains.
This article would fit that narrative as a symptom of one-upmanship gone amuck.
How do we exit this brutal cycle? It requires a generation of new blood that is actually concerned about societal stability and recognizes the connection between instability and leaving 99% of folks behind as games are fought in ‘the ivory cloud’.
Will this be dealt with sans revolution? Who knows...
The elephant in the room are transfer restrictions. VCs demand their preferred stock trade in the secondary market. At the same time, common stock is locked down. If the common stock is sellable before the company exits, the risk-reward calculus for company equity shifts in employees’ favor.
Say I want to sell common stock that I own, to someone who meets the SEC accredited investor definition. It seems that right of first refusal means that the company could buy the stock instead, but it would have to be at the price that I set with the external investor. In that case, don't I as an employee get liquidity either way, since it's being bought at the agreed upon price?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is: You can see which sales rep closed which deal and therefore can see what they brought in. (While a good sales rep assigned to a bad territory or losing a big deal last minute, after long negotiations, due to product quality suffers) Imma technical role that relationship isn't there as much. Sometimes one can implement a feature a specific customer (group) wants, sometimes a specific bug fix, but most of…
The point is: Sales team needs to _share_ with the team that is actually giving the salesperson a viable product. After all, we can “see what they [the developers] brought in”.
In most profitable software companies, it is indeed shared with through bonuses and RSUs, but it is not a well defined / easy to understand revenue share or profit share scheme.
The recent HN article on meritocracy comes to mind. I had never considered it this way in the past, but in the 70’s, productivity started decoupling massively from productivity gains. I.e. the best people at finance (meritocracy) figured out how to capture all the new earnings relative to the workers (who didn’t know this game was going on). This has snowballed into a situation where the financial meritocracy is comp…
I’m sorry gig workers, contractors, Amazon warehouse workers, startup workers, but there’s not much to see here. We’ll try to be better later if we get lucky enough to get a whole new industry again.
The recent HN article on meritocracy comes to mind. I had never considered it this way in the past, but in the 70’s, productivity started decoupling massively from productivity gains. I.e. the best people at finance (meritocracy) figured out how to capture all the new earnings relative to the workers (who didn’t know this game was going on). This has snowballed into a situation where the financial meritocracy is comp…
The recent HN article on meritocracy comes to mind. I had never considered it this way in the past, but in the 70’s, productivity started decoupling massively from productivity gains. I.e. the best people at finance (meritocracy) figured out how to capture all the new earnings relative to the workers (who didn’t know this game was going on). This has snowballed into a situation where the financial meritocracy is comp…
The recent HN article on meritocracy comes to mind. I had never considered it this way in the past, but in the 70’s, productivity started decoupling massively from productivity gains. I.e. the best people at finance (meritocracy) figured out how to capture all the new earnings relative to the workers (who didn’t know this game was going on). This has snowballed into a situation where the financial meritocracy is comp…
I don't buy this explanation. Very few employees are paid in any financially complex way. Wages dropping overall must have a different explanation, which I suspect is an increase in labor supply due to women entering the labor force and illegal immigration combined with a decrease in demand due to automation.
Are you insinuating it has nothing to do with executive wages ballooning (CEO compensation growing nearly 1,000% since the 1970's) and is instead because women are working?
The recent HN article on meritocracy comes to mind. I had never considered it this way in the past, but in the 70’s, productivity started decoupling massively from productivity gains. I.e. the best people at finance (meritocracy) figured out how to capture all the new earnings relative to the workers (who didn’t know this game was going on). This has snowballed into a situation where the financial meritocracy is comp…
I don't buy this explanation. Very few employees are paid in any financially complex way. Wages dropping overall must have a different explanation, which I suspect is an increase in labor supply due to women entering the labor force and illegal immigration combined with a decrease in demand due to automation.
It depends on the class of workers. I'd agree with you w/r/t most wage earners being paid in transparent manner. But I think the GP comment was referring to technology workers (given the context of HN.) In the case of tech workers, many are paid in very complex ways.
If you have illiquid stock options in a private company, and especially if you have taken a below-market salary as many startup employees have, your compensation is about as complex as a CDO. Just like a CDO there are multiple tiers above you that need to be paid out before you ever get paid.
Unlike a CDO, where you can actually pull up the details on the tiers above you (tranches), at startups as employees, you dont get to see the cap table, so the whole maze is invisible too!
Worse, unlike a CDO where you can sell at any time, here you have to exercise and hold stock for some far-away liquidity event that usually doesnt happen. So you have an invisible maze, and then a pot of gold at the end, perhaps. Or not.