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Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth

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Re: Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fun part comes when you put in 20 years doing this, and your dream is to buy a nice house, and you finally get your seven-figure payout, and.... it's not enough to buy a house. Because now a house is 3 million dollars.

What kind of house had you been dreaming of? I live in SF, and even here $3M goes an awfully freaking long way.

I'm in Santa Barbara, CA. Good friend of mine just bought a shithole 3-2 1300sqft for $2.2m. $3M doesn't go very far considering 30 years ago it was retirement status almost anywhere.

Re: Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every now and then I dream about how much more money I'd be making if I lived in the Bay Area, but then I read something like this and realize that earning ~half as much working remotely from a cheaper (at least when I bought) city maybe isn't so bad.

They are greatly exaggerating. One tangible advantage to living somewhere expensive with higher salaries is that anything you can buy online is effectively that much cheaper. An iPhone costs the same in Arkansas as in San Jose, so you'd end up working many more hours to buy one in AR than in CA, on average. Yes, housing is more expensive. A lot more. Everything else is way cheaper.

The trick is to rent cheap and live like a college student in SF/bay area while young, save aggressively, invest intelligently, then move somewhere comfortable but more affordable (CO's front range is lovely) for your 30s/40s.

Re: Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google did a weird thing where they poached windsurf employees, licensed their tech and hired the CEO and upper management, leaving a shelled out company behind Looks like employees were given an exploding offer to join Google and sacrifice windsurf shares at a low valuation, or stick with windsurf If you stuck with windsurf you then joined cognition in a later acquisition

Why would they give the CEO a bunch of money to join Google, but not employee #2? Is it possible the CEO is just worth way more for what ever reason?

I reckon it has something to do with what % of the company was owned by the CEO vs employee #2.

Re: Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

anything within 45 minutes of your office in palo alto (where you are mandated to show up 5 days a week). this will get you a 1300sqft piece of shit built in 1964 with asbestos and lead paint and lead pipes and a cracked foundation (also some dipshit realtor had them paint all the original wood beams and paneling inside gloss white and replace the original wood and slate floors with grey vinyl) from some baby boomer…

Or you could spend half that in the heart of SF and have a nice place in a decent neighborhood: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1265-Union-St-San-Francis... It's not that it's cheap here, not by any measure, but it's not nearly so dire as y'all want to claim.

With $3MM you could just stop working and live in many other nice enough places without ever having to work again.

Re: Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth

#286
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ive been in these rooms and heard the conversations, employees are seen as disposable liabilities

YUP Terms and phrases I've heard verbatim from investors and/or founders: "There's a thousand ways to screw minority shareholdeers." "Cram-down" (repeatedly, like it is an ordinary thing to do, effectively repudiating or diluting away entire classes of debt and/or equity) "I hate to lie, but you often have to." (said as if there is no choice in the matter) "You have to screw the other guy before he screws you." "If t…

[dead]

Re: Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth

#287
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a million, go live literally anywhere that isn't Silicon Valley, remote work for a company that interests you, or your own project. There's very few currencies in the world in which 1M isn't enough to retire. USD isn't one of them.

>There's very few currencies in the world in which 1M isn't enough to retire. USD isn't one of them. Unless you're planning on retiring as cheaply as humanly possible, 1M is not enough to retire for the large majority of the currencies in the world.

$1M is enough to "Ramen Retire" in most of the US. If you're willing to eat noodles and make some lifestyle sacrifices, it's kinda sorta doable.

Re: Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of house had you been dreaming of? I live in SF, and even here $3M goes an awfully freaking long way.

anything within 45 minutes of your office in palo alto (where you are mandated to show up 5 days a week). this will get you a 1300sqft piece of shit built in 1964 with asbestos and lead paint and lead pipes and a cracked foundation (also some dipshit realtor had them paint all the original wood beams and paneling inside gloss white and replace the original wood and slate floors with grey vinyl) from some baby boomer…

Are you the kind of person who refuses to go to the east bay or live next to middle class Asian Americans or Latinos? Because there are plenty of nice places for 3m 45 minutes from Palo Alto. Arguably you could get a house on the south side of the city and be 45 minutes from downtown PA by car or Caltrain.

Re: Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should have bought in when Prop 13 went into effect, you’d only be paying $3k in property taxes today instead of $40k.

Or inherit the Prop 13 rate from your parents.

I voted against prop 13, but now I like it living in a house in Westchester for 44 years.

Re: Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth

#290

Directly contradicts Garry Tan's post saying that all forty founding engineers got seven figure payouts from the Google acquisition: https://x.com/garrytan/status/1947072583092052406 Even if the OP considers the full headline number of $2.4b to be the value of the company, and taking his "1% of fair" number as truth, seven figure payouts would imply all 40 founding engineers had >4% equity which is nonsensical.

Why would you believe extremely motivated hearsay from Garry Tan? The man is already very untrustworthy before we get into the "I heard" and conflict of interest.
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