[deleted]
Atlassian Acquires Loom
291–300 of 408 posts
Re: Atlassian Acquires Loom
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you mind sharing the ballpark arithmetic that leads to this conclusion?
most of the employees came in at later rounds, so play it out. ex: They'd get say $100K in options on paper, but the pitch would be the company is high-growth, so expectation of 2X, 10X, 20X, etc over next few years. That $100K is really $200K next year, $2M the year after, etc. Except they sold the company at a ~flat multiple over the valuation. If employees got RSUs, then at least they made say $65K after short-ter…
That’s not how option pricing works. This is a private company, and it was raising money using preferred shares. The employee shares underlying the options would have been common stock.
At least once a year the company would be required to do a 409a valuation to set the FMV for those underlying common shares and thus the strike price for any options in the next year or less. The 409a valuation for common shares is pretty much always going to be significantly discounted vs preferred for a variety of reasons like lack of liquidation preference, lack of liquidity, etc. These discounts are often 50% plus, but the shares likely have a 1:1 economic value to other share classes in a sale, except the most recent preferred that get to use their preference.
Anyways the reality is going to be determined by each company’s details, but option strike prices at private companies are generally much lower than the current going price for preferred due to the discounts provided by the 409a valuation.
Re: Atlassian Acquires Loom
#293If you have a mac, buy Compressor app from Apple set up Folder watch, use Zoom to start an empty video meeting to show video of yourself, minimize(shift cmd m) and float(cmd alt f) the zoom window, then use MacOS screen record(cmd shift 5) to record. I can get this screen grab setup up running in 10 seconds. You don’t need Loom for most cases
You can use quicktime to show your webcam + cmd-shift-5 as well.
Re: Atlassian Acquires Loom
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
They raised $200M and sold for $1B. Options from the last raise would be under water, but they operated for years before that raise. There are likely a lot of employees doing reasonably well.
The amount they raised is meaningless to an option holder, only the valuation. If the employee joined at the 1.5B valuation, they got nothing
In some cases, they probably have lost money if they early exercised at that valuation.
Re: Atlassian Acquires Loom
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
The amount they raised is meaningless to an option holder, only the valuation. If the employee joined at the 1.5B valuation, they got nothing
Not nothing, just a fat haircut of ~40%, right?
Nothing is the best case (if they didn't exercise options). You're right: some lost money on the transaction if they did exercise, outside special consideration.
Re: Atlassian Acquires Loom
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
They raised $200M and last raised at $1.5B. Depending on liquidation preference clauses I don't think any employee outside the founders will make much from this sale.
They raised $200M and sold for $1B. Options from the last raise would be under water, but they operated for years before that raise. There are likely a lot of employees doing reasonably well.
I don't think you can just say that bout the last raise.
Depends on the exercise price. Exercise price is lower than the preferred price that the investor paid. Due to the fact that investors get preferred shares.
409a can often be 20% of the preferred valuation.
Re: Atlassian Acquires Loom
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, what a great filter the CEO came up with. If someone doesn't want to use the product, they probably won't make a good fit to work there.
You don't have to drink the koolaide to be a productive member of the team. Drinking the koolaide doesn't mean you'll be a productive member of the team. Pretty pointless of a filter
Did you mean to say the same thing two different ways?
> koolaide
In reference to the product, it is Kool-Aid.
Re: Atlassian Acquires Loom
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
most of the employees came in at later rounds, so play it out. ex: They'd get say $100K in options on paper, but the pitch would be the company is high-growth, so expectation of 2X, 10X, 20X, etc over next few years. That $100K is really $200K next year, $2M the year after, etc. Except they sold the company at a ~flat multiple over the valuation. If employees got RSUs, then at least they made say $65K after short-ter…
That’s not how option pricing works. This is a private company, and it was raising money using preferred shares. The employee shares underlying the options would have been common stock. At least once a year the company would be required to do a 409a valuation to set the FMV for those underlying common shares and thus the strike price for any options in the next year or less. The 409a valuation for common shares is pr…
Yes. For instance, at an early stage company I co-founded, we saw 409A of 10% of the most recent priced round.
Re: Atlassian Acquires Loom
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
The amount they raised is meaningless to an option holder, only the valuation. If the employee joined at the 1.5B valuation, they got nothing
In some cases, they probably have lost money if they early exercised at that valuation.
They wouldn't have exercised at that valuation. The options would be priced based on the 409a, which would be much much less than 1.5B.
Re: Atlassian Acquires Loom
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
Loom makes it very easy to voice over and annotate a recording, with both individually editable in a way raw screen recordings don't support, and to share the result via a link. It's not (yet?) heavily used among engs where I am, but we love it anyway for massively shortening the feedback loop with designers who can drop a 30-second demo of some prototype UI at the head of a Slack thread and asynchronously receive th…
Personally, I'm not 100% sure those videos are a net benefit for teams. It definitely reduces the effort required by the person creating the video, but comes at the expense of requiring more effort from the people consuming the content. While there are certainly cases where showing is easier than telling, more often I find the quick videos are more verbose and less well organized than a doc or a message. "I didn't ha…
> requiring more effort from the people consuming the content
This hasn't been my experience; if anything, quite the opposite, in that it's enabled my team to contribute much more actively to design. The effort of providing actionable feedback is admittedly slightly higher, but that's not a bad thing; needing to (and having time to!) write up feedback seems to yield more actionable results than doing it verbally in the moment, and for things that do really need talking through we have several sync touchpoints during the week with our embedded designer.
Of course, in contexts where no such touchpoints exist or where design and eng generally don't have a close relationship, I could see Loom being difficult - but I'm not sure I'd blame that first on the tool; if Design and Eng communicate only by throwing things over a transom at one another, I think the tool much more likely exposes problems you already had and didn't know about.