261–270 of 342 posts
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You were granted shares, similar to founder's stock. I'm talking about options, which have a strike price. In my scenario, you in effect exercise (buy) the shares before they vest, which is on its face kind of impossible. One way I've heard it done is you sign a letter authorizing the company to buy back the unvested shares if you leave -- in effect, you buy the shares, simultaneously giving the company an option to…
"One way I've heard it done is you sign a letter authorizing the company to buy back the unvested shares if you leave" That is the only way I have heard of early exercise working. "Under this rubrick, you owe no taxes at all, since money flows from you to the company, therefore there is no taxable compensation." To be clear, the way this works is that the time of exercise you have income (AMT only for ISOs, regular i…
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I had similar experience with startups. With current conventions in startup labor market, only being a founder or or being at Facebook as number Both are off my list because I'm not lucky enough to join the next Facebook and I'm not capable of founding a company myself at the moment. Getting sweet $170k salary with some bonus, massage, free food and shuttle is good enough for me.
You don't have to be one of the 10 first employees at Facebook to get paid: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2072204/Facebook-IPO... As a general rule of thumb, if a company is willing to do the extremely expensive action of acquihiring, they are willing to part a pretty high amount of equity of employees. Not acquihire-high of course, but a pretty good amount. Of course, it could be argued that they aren't "s…
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Early exercise makes the most sense for seed stage companies where the exercise price is still low... at companies where you have to spend $50K or more to exercise, I've seen loans being handed out by the company to its executives to make it possible for them to take advantage of it.
Any insight into why a company wouldn't allow forward exercising? The legal/finance team at my company refused to do it, though I wasn't given an explanation why.
* Employees have less incentive to stay because they won't run into the AMT "handcuff" situation (where if they leave they have to exercise their options or lose them, and they can't afford to pay the taxes to exercise the options).
* More employees will actually exercise their options before liquidity, which means more minority shareholders.
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Most underperformers don't really cause any problems. They work slowly and can't be assigned anything important, but over time the organization can adapt to them. Consequently, nothing really happens to them until there's a general belt-tightening. Usually, because people don't like being dicks and most underperformers aren't disliked, they're rolled into a general layoff and get a severance. Overperformers, on the o…
"You're also probably the type of person who, when served with a PIP despite being one the biggest assets to the company, will go nuclear, create morale-killing spectacles, and be talked about for years afterward" I think Googler's and Xooglers on HN have by now learned to restrain themselves but I've had enough of this troll. I don't know what the actual psychiatric terminology would be but I know what the symptoms…
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> software developers are as a demographic cohort terrible at negotiating. Yep. It's no real surprise that coders are mostly men with poor social skills, while HR is mostly women with good ones, most of whom those men find attractive. Classic Valley symbiosis.
I think that is just poor stereotyping. Most of the software developers I've worked with in my career have had very good social skills, those that didn't, were poor developers as well... So are they bad negotiators because of they lack negotiating ability, or actual ability? Is there data on the social skills of IT, HR, Gender breakdown etc... Perhaps what you are refering to is a U.S (?) phenomenon?
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You've identified one of the reasons I hesitate to put myself in the "startup labor market" for any startup that isn't well-funded. Even well-funded startups give me pause. I'm not interested in putting in founder-like work for entry-level employee-like compensation plus a lottery ticket. Unless the equity is meaningful and imbues the recipient with an actual, real voice in the direction of the company it's just a wa…
I'm curious: what is "founder-like work" to you? Is it 50–80 hour work weeks? Or does it mean 40 hours but making the initial, architectural decisions of a new piece of software? Serious question.
* The medical sort, and here in Holland the Pharmacists require the same education as a medical doctor but specializing in pharmaceuticals not diagnosis.
Engineers working in Huawei bought shares priced at net asset value with salary or bank loans and gain dividends at a yearly ROI around 17%~75%.
This unique 'communist' capital structure was created due to lack of venture capital and outside financing. It's also an experiment before China fully adopting western style corporation law.
Huawei has a complicated capital structure of founder (1.42%) + employee union (98.58%) which scared many big investors away and hindered it from IPO.
Recently, Huawei adjusted the virtual stock policy to freeze its capital structure because the structure complexity incurred a lot of accusations from the US government and harmed its growth in several major markets.
Alibaba also failed to request change of Hongkong IPO rules to apply employee-partnership to protect its senior employees.
Therefore, employee equity isn't merely about internal profit sharing or fairness at all. Investors or traditional capital markets don't like the 'communist' flavored capital structure.
Employee option is the only viable solution before some one totally disrupt the current capital market.