191–200 of 326 posts
yet, the company:
- was founded in early 2000's
- has about 4,000 employees
- from my experience, does not move fast. too much bureaucracy & too many management-compliance related tasks impede developer speed, focus, and context-stability.
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This is very cherry-picked. Actually research has found that prior business success does not predict future success at all. Though failure does predict failure, so at least avoid that.
How is it mathematically possible for prior failure to predict failure, without prior success predicting success?
Else if (past success) then (future Unk)
In other words: you can be successful for many reasons, but typically fail for one.
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This is very cherry-picked. Actually research has found that prior business success does not predict future success at all. Though failure does predict failure, so at least avoid that.
How is it mathematically possible for prior failure to predict failure, without prior success predicting success?
- Prior failure, most likely the next venture will fail.
- Prior success, most likely the next venture will fail.
Basically, odds are that a venture will fail regardless of past performance, similar to how past lottery winning doesn't predict future lottery winning. Personally, I don't think it's necessarily true (successful founders will already have an existing audience and investors for their next product), but mathematically this could be one way it holds true.
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The thing most people forget about options & RSU is that one is taking away a big chunk of the TC and delay it to a future year. Even when you hate your job, you will be hesitant to leave the company because of FOMO and sunk cost fallacy That said, anecdotally, every one of my close circle of friends made decent amount money from equity (one of the many companies they worked at did very well) - far higher than the 10…
> The thing most people forget about options & RSU is that one is taking away a big chunk of the TC and delay it to a future year. That's not my experience. My TC is the amount I'll actually make this year (and have made in previous years), which includes my salary, bonus, and the value of the RSUs at vesting, which I auto-sell. I'm not "delaying" anything; I'm making great money right now . Unvested shares only matt…
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>The ultimate realization was in a startup you have equity, a decent amount in a good startup. At Microsoft it was a base salary and set amount of stock. I joined a startup in 1999. There were 3 founders and I was employee #2 after that. I received a ton of options (this was before RSUs became popular). We had a great product and a great team, but 18 months later ran out of money and unfortunately it was right after…
The thing most people forget about options & RSU is that one is taking away a big chunk of the TC and delay it to a future year. Even when you hate your job, you will be hesitant to leave the company because of FOMO and sunk cost fallacy That said, anecdotally, every one of my close circle of friends made decent amount money from equity (one of the many companies they worked at did very well) - far higher than the 10…
Options in a startup are extremely likely to be worth nothing, ever. Not only does the company need some sort of liquidity or exit event, but the valuation then also has to be higher than the strike price on your options. And options usually have punishing exercise-or-lose-them requirements if you leave the company before a liquidity event.
RSUs, once they vest, are yours without having to exercise them. If it's a public company you can turn around and sell them on the open market immediately if you desire and get cash for them. If the company's stock declines, your RSUs are still worth something since the "basis" is $0. If you leave the company, your vested RSUs are still yours.
Yes 1-year cliffs for vesting are common and do defer compensation, but 1 year is not a long time at all to be at a company especially a large public company. After the first year the regular vesting cadence sets in and it's just a slightly more complicated form of cash, with market risk.
Over the past few years that market risk has hugely benefitted most tech companies and RSU recipients. In 2020 my RSU comp was more than 50% of my total comp, basically doubling my (already high) base salary. ESPP further compounded that.
When I was at PowerBI in Microsoft, all the execs hailed it as Startup within Microsoft. Come work here instead of Uber. I worked like a dog, sometimes till 2am in morning. My manager would routinely ask us to come on weekends. I was naive, I thought we are growing customer base, this is what a startup looks like. The ultimate realization was in a startup you have equity, a decent amount in a good startup. At Microso…
Most engineers at startups get very little equity and most end up worthless due to dilution or failure. Even if engineers hit the startup lottery, the payout for most are not that much. Very few end with multi million dollar payouts. Statistically, financials are better with big company offers for most engineers. Some engineers that get in early with a unicorn can hit the jackpot. This is mostly combination of timing…
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> the median startup option package was exercised for a profit of $30k That must be one of those cases where "median" and "average" are very different.
There are many different kinds of averages. Median average, arithmetic mean average, geometric mean average, mode average. People frequently, and intentionally when it comes to politics, use the word average to muddy the information and evoke whatever emotion they want rather than specify the type of average.
In non normally distributed populations, the average is misleading because of skew at either end of the curve.
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In my humble opinion, Bitcoin is a better lottery that equity, because it does not require you to work till 2am in morning. Instead of equity, ask for higher salary, and invest the difference in cryptocurrencies, stock market, and even the old-fashioned lottery. Maybe a bit of everything, to balance the portfolio. Your chances are not worse, and you can go sleep before the midnight.
Well but how do you get the money to buy any bitcoin in the first place ? You don't invest in crypto currencies, you join early enough to sell to the next level of the pyramid you convince via social media post :s But well you're right to say people should balance portfolio, I however don't see the value of the lottery, it's like paying taxes twice, with no chance of winning ever. At least bitcoin slowly loses value,…
The expected ROI of the lottery is so low though It's hard to take someone seriously that mentions playing the lottery as an actual smart financial move.
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In my humble opinion, Bitcoin is a better lottery that equity, because it does not require you to work till 2am in morning. Instead of equity, ask for higher salary, and invest the difference in cryptocurrencies, stock market, and even the old-fashioned lottery. Maybe a bit of everything, to balance the portfolio. Your chances are not worse, and you can go sleep before the midnight.
Great thought! It doesn't have to be crypto, it could be any reasonable investment...
He'll do pretty well in the IPO because he has some of those early enough options as one of the first 25ish employees.
BUT!!!He left MSFT at $30-40ish a share, now worth $240 a share. Unfortunately, he divested most of it into more general index which has been fine, but not 6x.
He would have EASILY covered whatever money he's likely to make in the IPO by just staying at Microsoft and holding company shares for the last 9 years, and in fact probably would have made way more given stock rewards/promotions/salary increases etc.
That being said, he has enjoyed working at the startup and it has propelled him into a role that he wouldn't have been in at MSFT or any other big company so there is that to consider as well.
I'm not sure why everyone seems so focused on the cafeteria thing. I'm not sure people and their attitudes towards amenities are really the problem here. From my understanding, the differerence is the companywide attitude to risk. A startup has a "grow at any cost, or maybe perish" attitude. If things go south, bankruptcy will take care of the leftover excess risk (barring criminal charges). A bigco cannot easily go…
The thing with the cafeteria is that it reflects company culture. If you in the office sit at a desk in the Google search engine area or youtube or Waymo is hardly noticable. People have settled in an if the neighboring teams go home at "normal" times, the "startup" team will go home at those times. Also you have a hard time to keep the small team culture when directly embedded. And then corporates encourage changing…