131–140 of 360 posts
Living in San Francisco is expensive as fuck. You should do everything to make your employees lives easier so they can concentrate more time to work.
A side question on his net calculation, how did he end up with 63% tax rate? anyone care to elaborate
FWIW, if anyone did ask my advice about what benefits to offer, I'd tell them to err on the side of generosity. I certainly tell them to err on that side with equity grants.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the flip side, I've seen insane (from a US standpoint) rules on vesting at UK startups, like "the company gets all your options back if you leave." Don't know if this is SOP or not.
I can't name the company, but this isn't limited to the UK. It's found in other countries too. Maybe there's too much history/tradition/peer-pressure/competition in the States for this kind of arrangement to fly. I'd immediately bolt for the door if someone demanded such a structure on me.
The problem here I think is the disparity between being the last cofounder (15-30% equity before dilution typically) and being the first employee (1-2%) vs working for a more established company. If you compare the compensation for being an early employee in such a startup with working for an established company (eg Google, Facebook) then I think you'll find the employee of the latter will be better off in the long t…
Tiny, tiny nit: that final phrase is redundant. Calculating an expected financial outcome includes the risk.
Agree with everything you're saying.
From the Author's bio: "I'm just this guy who used to enjoy tech, now I would rather build bicycles. I still work in the tech industry, for the money, but I no longer call myself a "technologist"." So points well made that a guy with children, in mid-career, and without much of a passion for the field he's working in finds a Y-Combinator offer to be less compelling than a more traditional package. But I'm not sure wh…
I guess the point of his post is the YC companies are only attractive to some one below 25 years of age with no family to care about. That would mean the YC companies are all looking for the few talented below 25 yr old people.
I don't think benefits are the main reason to work anywhere -- doing meaningful work and working with great people far exceeds financial benefit, and salary/bonus/equity should dominate fringe benefits. However, why do benefits packages need to be uniform? I personally hate having "benefits" in my compensation which come out of my salary which I don't really want. Sometimes companies get tax savings (i.e. they can de…
>doing meaningful work and working with great people overall this is true, but its as rare as a finding an employee like the one in the article to accept accept below market rates and less than stellar benefits.
(The exception was government contracting, where it was >$250k/yr but the most meaningless work, 3 year old broken Dell laptops, and generally horrible.)
The entitlement culture in the tech industry is mind boggling. One day we may look back and wonder how we ever had it so good. Perhaps we'll even envy the person paid $1 per day to suck the gold off our old circuit boards.
People in tech don't realize just how lucky they are. I'm 20 with no wife or kids, and I'm making more per year than certainly almost all of my friends will be making after they choose to actually finish college and get a salaried job. However, I'm told by people that myself and my colleagues are getting underpaid (we work at a startup). Ridiculous.
The one you're using has to do with how much you deserve as a person. You see yourself as no different from your friends. You pursued something that interested you and it led you to a job. They are probably doing the same thing. Yet here you are making more than all of them. What have you done to deserve that? Most likely, nothing at all. You were lucky to enjoy something which led you to this end. You never sought out money; you just ended up getting what seems like more than your fair share of it.
The other definition, the one that almost everybody here on HN will use, is one devoid of human connections. It's just about what the market rate is in comparison to how much value, dollar-wise, you produce for the corporation you work for.
The prestige asset generated by YC is interesting, because I bet it's going to have an unintended consequence of increasing the social difference between founders and employees. If you're a YC founder, you're in the club. You were picked. It's great if you succeed; if you fail, you have a network. If you're a YC employee, you're just an employee of a small startup. YC founders seem, at least from this, to be blind to…
Well said.
It's actually infuriating when one joins a pre-YC company and contribute to the company, yet don't get to attend any of the events. It's like as a non-founder you are not worthy of ever setting foot in their room or gaining knowledge, despite the fact that so many non-founders have contributed significantly to a company's trajectory. Though I think the Silicon Valley community has an especially strong fixation on founders.