Is it time to spin up http://fuckedcompany.com/ again?
No familiar with this. What was it about?
Startup Dead Pool. Fantasy football except betting when the company will fail.
Bolt Financial's loans come due
101–110 of 204 posts
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#102Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#103No post body was provided.
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#104What people don’t know is the CEO Ryan Breslinlow founded the company that constructed the loans. He played both sides.
He's a founder -- NOT the CEO who is Maju Kuruvilla. Ryan might be CFO though so an executive.
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Bolt should just have annulled them entirely These loans were made cashlessly as part of an early option exercise. That is steeped deeply in the internal revenue code. The forgiven principal would be at the very least income. Then the tax benefits from the early exercise would retroactively apply with penalties and interest. All of this assuming the IRS doesn't view the move as a heads I win (if the company does we…
>>I'm somewhat blown away by this whole thing. Leverage to finance an already-leveraged derivatives position on illiquid stock. From the issuer of said stock. Who is also the borrower's employee. That's both risky and dodgy! It's risky, but not necessarily dodgy. Many employers do not even permit early exercise and I wish more did as I could have substantially reduced my tax burden in some situations. Taking loans fo…
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Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same problem with the student loan forgiveness being pushed in the US currently. My cynical take is that they’d just do the forgiveness and refuse to talk about the people in the situation you described.
Most of the attitude I’ve seen to that situation is “tough luck, life isn’t fair”… seemingly oblivious to their original argument for forgiveness being it’s unfair they’re saddled with that debt.
Politics is a numbers game, though, not a moral one. There are ~258M adults in the US. ~43M of them have student loans. Already you can see a problem. 17% is nowhere near a majority. If you are looking to make people happy and vote for you, targeting a 17% demographic is not an ideal strategy to begin with.
But some amount of the remaining 83% had student loans and paid them off. Comments on HN and Reddit notwithstanding, a non-trivial fraction of those will be put off by a decision to forgive current student loans.
Some other amount of people, probably a majority, never went to college to begin with. From their perspective, you just gave free money to a minority of people who were already privileged to begin with, by even being able to go to college at any price.
This is not how you win elections, and politicians primarily exist to win elections. It is entirely possible that forgiving student loans would result in a net-negative change in votes in the next election, and maybe for a while after that.
At the very least they need to fix the underlying problem before creating such a moral hazard, or the next round will be much bigger. If they really want to buy votes this way, it would probably be more effective to just give yet another stimulus -- a nice, big one -- to every voter in the country.
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Bolt should just have annulled them entirely These loans were made cashlessly as part of an early option exercise. That is steeped deeply in the internal revenue code. The forgiven principal would be at the very least income. Then the tax benefits from the early exercise would retroactively apply with penalties and interest. All of this assuming the IRS doesn't view the move as a heads I win (if the company does we…
Perhaps they plan to lay off a lot more of those employees in the next round and they want to get the process figured out early?
or they use the restructuring as a valid reason to do a layoff and get rid of "dead weight"
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#108I don't get the value of this company. How can fellow SWEs who learnt about kernels, networks and hardware (among other incredibly complicated works) get excited about ONE CLICK CHECKOUT? Maybe this is the JS boot camp effect.
How can you not get excited or at least, curiously so, to see how they solve this "problem"?
How is bolt going to be better or different than PayPal checkout or the amazing Apple Pay checkout (I literally use Safari for this).
PayPal checkout kinda sucks (the UX was bad when I used it years ago, not sure how its improved). Apple Pay is way better on UX, but can only be used in specific cases.
Simplifying something complex that the user uses as a one-click can/is exciting. I don't think Bolt is the solution though.
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#109Boy do I hate how ISO options are treated by the IRS for startup employees. It puts an insane amount of risk on the employee in both coming up with the cash to exercise(bolt offered loans for this part) and then the worst part, being taxed on unrealized gains. The latter to me seems completely against how the rest of the tax code when it comes to stock based assets. And it leaves employees who are not well informed o…
- If you join as an early employee, your strike price is minimal and this isn't a concern at all - If you want to minimize risk in return for higher taxes (call ~40%), just hold your ISOs and exercise-and-sell as a same-day sale when you're liquid (ie forgo the tax advantages of ISOs). There's absolutely no way for you to get screwed over if you're willing to take the gain as standard income.
except in cases where you are let go or decide to leave.
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm one of those "most people" right now. I make a a great wage and have savings in the bank. However I have a 6 month old baby at home and a wife who is taking time off from her career to look after our baby. I also left a job I was at for almost 5 years and exercised my options on the way out. This cost me almost $30k in cash. At my new job early exercising would cost me nearly $40k. Spending $40k to early exercise…
These types of companies self select for people who are comfortable taking on more risk. If this is your thought process why would you even put yourself in a situation where you pick an offer from a company that offers options as part of your comp over RSUs or a public company? I don’t doubt that many people have the same thought process, but if I decline to early exercise from a company that offers that option the a…
I selected the company I'm at because they offered me the highest salary of all the places I was interviewing. They also have a product in domain I'm very familiar with and are a size that would allow me to have a big impact on the engineering org. Basically this opportunity checked all the boxes I set out to check when I decided to leave my last job.
I'll vest my options here without exercising and if they turn into something one day that'll be nice. In the meantime I'll collect the nice salary I negotiated for myself and grow my career the way I wanted.
Edit:
A little clarification about my last role. I took that job because they were using tech I wanted to learn and they had a team I wanted to work with. They also offered me salary that was a healthy bump from where I was at at the time. I didn't early exercise those options back then because I didn't know enough about the company to justify plunking down the cash. After being there nearly 5 years I believe in the company a lot and see the exercise as a smart investment. I don't have that clarity yet for my current role and so it just doesn't make sense to me to early exercise.