81–90 of 191 posts
First employee hired at a startup. Paid for my options before leaving the company. Six months later the company was acquihired by Google. Three months after that I was given paperwork informing me that those shares are now worth exactly $0.00/each. Founders made out well enough from the deal to pick up high-end luxury sports cars though, which is the important part of an exit, right?
Were you fully vested?
Do any startups still do reverse vesting with an 83b filing?
So, who are the lucky few to have earned more than 11M :)
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Maybe you should let us know what the startup was, as well as the people behind it, so we can avoid working with them.
No, James is doing the right thing taking a more noble path and not publicy defaming the company. There is a time and place for that and these sort of discussions will not be conducive for the HN community. Talking about his experience will be what most of us be interested in. Having said that, all you need is 2 minutes, google and you can easily deduce yourself what company he is referring to.
James you did well not telling the name, it's good to see that there are still a bunch of people out there with strong ethics. However is a shame what happened to you but the world takes many turns and sometimes people realize about mistakes when is too late. You will see and laugh.
Cheers,
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Depends on the contract. It could be argued as unconscionable but that is a different matter.
You're suggesting that having classes of shares is unconscionable? If the idea of preferred shares shocks your conscience, you should spend a lot more time studying how startup financing works (at a nuts and bolts level) before taking the plunge and working at one.
I guess this is really something you only learn when you are the one signing the financing docs.
You'd have to be pretty dumb to be an employee at a startup because of the money: bad hours, lots of risk, bad pay and lots of personal confrontation.
Max, are you trolling here? This kinda smells like trolling, because I don't think you'd be the type to generalize across all startups like this.
Would be more interesting to see values divided by founders, early employees, late employees.
Probably something like 95%/4%/1% That's not percentage of the company - that's percentage of the equity held by employees. In some cases it might actually turn out a bit better, like 90/5/5 or something like that. Regardless, the outcome seen by founders is orders of magnitude better than even early employees. This can be exacerbated by a bunch of games that can be played at an exit to make the disparity larger. For…