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Poll: How much money have stock options brought you?

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Re: Poll: How much money have stock options brought you?

#51

Post by bsims »

mixmax wrote: post #49

I think someone's skewing the poll. Personal wealth follows a powerlaw distribution, and there's good reason to believe that income from stock options is somewhat similar. If you look at the numbers above they make reasonably sense except for the " in the hundreds of millions " which is far too high compared to the others. The " in the hundreds " and " in the thousands " should be higher, but I'd wager that that can…

I don't think it necessarily has to be evenly distributed. If you think about options people probably either A) Made a good amount of money or B) Made none at all. Most companies issuing options are likely venture backed and not going to settle for a marginal gain. Thoughts?

Re: Poll: How much money have stock options brought you?

#53

Post by FireBeyond »

bsims wrote: post #51
mixmax wrote: post #49

I think someone's skewing the poll. Personal wealth follows a powerlaw distribution, and there's good reason to believe that income from stock options is somewhat similar. If you look at the numbers above they make reasonably sense except for the " in the hundreds of millions " which is far too high compared to the others. The " in the hundreds " and " in the thousands " should be higher, but I'd wager that that can…

I don't think it necessarily has to be evenly distributed. If you think about options people probably either A) Made a good amount of money or B) Made none at all. Most companies issuing options are likely venture backed and not going to settle for a marginal gain. Thoughts?

Maybe there's some old school Microsoft types, etc., because other than that I'm skeptical that only 8 people have made 'tens of millions', but 35 have made 'hundreds of millions or more' (or that 35 have made that at all)...

Re: Poll: How much money have stock options brought you?

#54

Post by mixmax »

bsims wrote: post #51
mixmax wrote: post #49

I think someone's skewing the poll. Personal wealth follows a powerlaw distribution, and there's good reason to believe that income from stock options is somewhat similar. If you look at the numbers above they make reasonably sense except for the " in the hundreds of millions " which is far too high compared to the others. The " in the hundreds " and " in the thousands " should be higher, but I'd wager that that can…

I don't think it necessarily has to be evenly distributed. If you think about options people probably either A) Made a good amount of money or B) Made none at all. Most companies issuing options are likely venture backed and not going to settle for a marginal gain. Thoughts?

I think it is, based on the fact that (as I mentioned in the GP) wealth follows a powerlaw distribution. I don't see why options wouldn't follow this trend, particularly because market cap of companies in an economy also follows a powerlaw. These are the two factors involved in options.

Re: Poll: How much money have stock options brought you?

#55

Post by tunesmith »

icedchai wrote: post #22

Where's the negative ($<0) option? I paid for some options and they were worthless.

Same here. Exercised at $3, never sold. They went down to $0.02 and more recently back up to $0.40. Could have made a lot had I bought at $0.02. I regularly tell myself to just sell the damn things so I can stop looking at the ticker.

Re: Poll: How much money have stock options brought you?

#56

Post by codex »

JOnAgain wrote: post #36
codex wrote: post #28

More than twelve users have sold stock options for more than $100M? Hello Larry, Sergey, Eric, and Tim! I would have suspected you were too busy to read HN.

If they've netted that much, that means they've sold. As such, there's a good chance they've retired, or at least only work on their own side projects now. Not everyone sells a company and then starts another one. Also, rich people have access to the same internet. Is there an "interesting shit about programming but only for rich people site" that I don't know about?

The number of people who have sold more than $100M in options (as opposed to founders' stock) is likely quite small, no? The poll is now up to 38.

Re: Poll: How much money have stock options brought you?

#57

Post by nostrademons »

mixmax wrote: post #48
hello_newman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it is true, or if it is someone just clicking on it for shits and giggles. I've often wondered who exactly reads HN.

HN is the best tech news aggregator on the net. Where do you think Larry, Sergey, Eric, and Tim get their news from? There are probably a lot more household tech names on HN than you'd initially expect.

Larry, Sergey, Eric, and Tim get their news from private research departments in their own firms. They may occasionally browse HN for downtime, but I really doubt they have time to read through it in depth. Hell, I'm just a lowly engineer and I rarely have time these days to read through it in depth.

Now, many of the employees of these companies frequently browse HN, and that can sometimes filter upwards if there're relevant or interesting articles there. In general executives rely on people specifically paid to sort through information for them, though. (Though I've heard Larry, Sergey, and many Google executives are big Google Reader users...I guess they'll have to find a new RSS reader now.)

Re: Poll: How much money have stock options brought you?

#58

Post by late2part »

nostrademons wrote: post #57
mixmax wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is the best tech news aggregator on the net. Where do you think Larry, Sergey, Eric, and Tim get their news from? There are probably a lot more household tech names on HN than you'd initially expect.

Larry, Sergey, Eric, and Tim get their news from private research departments in their own firms. They may occasionally browse HN for downtime, but I really doubt they have time to read through it in depth. Hell, I'm just a lowly engineer and I rarely have time these days to read through it in depth. Now, many of the employees of these companies frequently browse HN, and that can sometimes filter upwards if there're…

I don't know Larry or Sergey, and I'm not a big fanboi of theirs, but I do know some very wealthy, successful, and powerful people.

I can assure you - very few tech executives have staff members and assistants filter public information for them.

Yes, you want your internal folks to do executive summaries of internal plans/summaries/designs, etc.

And yes, they'll pay $5k/year (or more) to buy analyst reports that summarize things (e.g. bad example Cook Report on the Internet [that'll date me], or Gartner/etc reports).

But Jim Crowe at Level3 read RFCs, and I believe that people like Larry Ellison, Sergey, Zuckerberg, Marc Andresson, Marissa Meyer are reading the real source stuff. They're just doing it in a discrete manner and not posting.

Executives that ONLY rely on the people that report to them are relics of an age of bankers and dinosaurs.

Real tech leaders remain technical and close to the source.

Re: Poll: How much money have stock options brought you?

#60

Post by citricsquid »

codex wrote: post #28

More than twelve users have sold stock options for more than $100M? Hello Larry, Sergey, Eric, and Tim! I would have suspected you were too busy to read HN.

Every time polls happen here people openly vote for every option to "show how broken the HN poll system is" and to "prove that PG should make it so only one option can be selected", every now and again people gloat about doing it. It's really really lame.
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