181–190 of 204 posts
I 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.
I 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.
See also: the HN comment about Dropbox.
But I thought I'd give an example of how what Bolt did made sense in some rare cases, and is also extremely dangerous in almost all cases
I worked for 4 years as a Staff Engineer for a company that went public beyond my wildest dreams. I have worked for startups over 20 years and this was the first time it paid off for me.
I had a mix of RSUs and ISOs. The value of those when the company went public (shortly before I became fully vested) was over 2.5 million. All in all, I made about 3 million dollars (I stayed an additional 6 month and left once I hit 4 years).
Taxes ate a huge portion (left with 1.8 Million after taxes). Had I early exercised the ISOs, I would have conceivably paid about 700K less in taxes (if I had early exercised and pain 200K or so in taxes)
So something similar to the option that Bolt provided would have given me 500-700K additional.
Sounds good, right?
However, keep in mind most startups fail, and very few do as well as the one I was in did (I've worked for ~6 companies over the course of my career). The first one struck big, but I didn't sell (I could have made 100K after taxes when I was very young) and then the first dot com crash happened and that was that.
And then this one.
Let's look at what would have happened had I had an option like Bolt gave employees and the company had not gone public or worse, got laid off. I would have owed over 200K on a loan taken against stock that was now worthless.
So the pragmatist in me things that making an extra 750K on the 1/10 chances that the company IPO'ed and did well, vs a 9/10 chance that I would owe 200K.
Now, keep in mind I worked with people who were on their 2nd, 3rd successful startup and could afford to pay 200K in taxes on stock that might never pan out. The risk for them was "that sucks!". The risk for me would have been bankruptcy.
If you cannot afford to early exercise and take the tax hit if it does not pan out, you definitely, definitely cannot afford to take out a loan to early exercise your stock.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do they think they can get people to pay money back after terminating their employment?
"get" them to? I mean, by taking them to court and getting a court order for a bank levy or wage garnishment if needed, why not? If it's a legal debt, it's not really optional.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you grant stock and that’s taxed at grant or you grant RSUs that convert at vest and are taxed at vest. But the stock is not liquid. How are you going to pay the tax. At least, with options you can just choose to sit on them. One of my friends walked away from an options grant and I exercised only when I wanted to. No tax implication till exercise. That’s a big advantage. Early exercise is a big play. You do it if…
RSUs are only taxed when the company is liquid, not when they are vested (which is one and the same post IPO). So the tax free options are really just locking in long term cap gains. Of course the con is that it’s not actual compensation as the stroke will be equal to the present valuation.
Also FWIW the company can withhold some shares as they vest but max 22% for federal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
ceo gives off Jim Jones vibes.
Indeed. Someone linked this Forbes profile of him in a post yesterday: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2022/04/04/meet-t...
Lolololololololololo
Earlier quoted context omitted.
you pick two out of thousands! Google IPO'd so long ago that the rules regarding ISOs were different back then, strike prices could be arbitrarily lowered to whatever value the company wanted, not the maximum valuation as required by law now. https://www.sec.gov/news/testimony/2006/ts090606cc.htm
And this “I’ll get rich!” statistical improbability is why thousand of employees are willing to work for less than their market value in exchange for Monopoly money. My former CTO who did have a lot to do with our former company having a 10x exit after I left (with very little equity that I didn’t exercise) tried to get me to work with him as a tech lead for what would have been a competitive local offer (mid 100s) -…
And this is precisely my point. If less IC's believed this, it would put market pressure on startups to give them more options and better outcomes (including taxes).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No familiar with this. What was it about?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company "a "dot-com dead pool" that chronicled troubled and failing companies in a unique and abrasive manner" It was a nice counter-weigh to corporate PR-speak.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And this “I’ll get rich!” statistical improbability is why thousand of employees are willing to work for less than their market value in exchange for Monopoly money. My former CTO who did have a lot to do with our former company having a 10x exit after I left (with very little equity that I didn’t exercise) tried to get me to work with him as a tech lead for what would have been a competitive local offer (mid 100s) -…
> And this “I’ll get rich!” statistical improbability is why thousand of employees are willing to work for less than their market value in exchange for Monopoly money. And this is precisely my point. If less IC's believed this, it would put market pressure on startups to give them more options and better outcomes (including taxes).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you grant stock and that’s taxed at grant or you grant RSUs that convert at vest and are taxed at vest. But the stock is not liquid. How are you going to pay the tax. At least, with options you can just choose to sit on them. One of my friends walked away from an options grant and I exercised only when I wanted to. No tax implication till exercise. That’s a big advantage. Early exercise is a big play. You do it if…
RSUs are only taxed when the company is liquid, not when they are vested (which is one and the same post IPO). So the tax free options are really just locking in long term cap gains. Of course the con is that it’s not actual compensation as the stroke will be equal to the present valuation.
Is it really true that tax is only if the asset is liquid? Does the IRS make a distinction between liquid and illiquid here?