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LivingSocial: Employees' and Founders' Common Stock Now Worthless

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Re: LivingSocial: Employees' and Founders' Common Stock Now Worthless

#231

Post by SilasX »

emmett wrote: post #221
kevinskii wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's equity, and then there's "equity." For example, a well-funded late stage startup recently offered me a salary that was $35k/year below the market rate, plus X hundred thousand stock options. These came with no strike price, and their grant was subject to final board approval after hiring. When I asked how I might possibly valuate these at anything other than zero dollars, they told me that this was just a sta…

Grants are always subject to board approval, due to corporate structure of literally every startup I've ever heard of. It's a rubber-stamp process (for normal-sized grants, anyway) and employees always get the options. Similarly, they can't specify the strike price because for legal reasons the strike price is set when the options are issued. Nonetheless, options of this kind are worth a potentially huge amount of mo…

>How many outstanding shares of stock do you have on a fully-diluted basis? X00,000s of stock options is meaningless, only percentages matter. You should always ask this question.

Bingo. I have no idea why they routinely fail to give enough information to make the option grant even remotely meaningful.

Fortunately, where I work, the head of finance told me how many shares were outstanding, fully diluted, and in writing, when I asked.

Re: LivingSocial: Employees' and Founders' Common Stock Now Worthless

#232

Post by chii »

jbooth wrote: post #188
chii wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can take the view that Good means profitable. thus if your business generate a profit you have done good. of course this is only true if the market is free.

Drug dealers? Pirates? Hell, the somali pirates even have an investment system now.

lets talk about drug dealers. The drug market isn't really a free market. THere isn't really easy competition, the means of production is difficult for people to get into. The participants don't really want to do it sometimes, but is forced to.

In fact, if the gov't legalized drugs, and let big pharmaceuticals produce these drugs, i reckon it'd drive the scarcity of the drugs down, leading to their devaluation, and the market would correspondingly collapse (as its no longer seen as the forbidden fruit).

Re: LivingSocial: Employees' and Founders' Common Stock Now Worthless

#233

Post by jbooth »

chii wrote: post #232
jbooth wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drug dealers? Pirates? Hell, the somali pirates even have an investment system now.

lets talk about drug dealers. The drug market isn't really a free market. THere isn't really easy competition, the means of production is difficult for people to get into. The participants don't really want to do it sometimes, but is forced to. In fact, if the gov't legalized drugs, and let big pharmaceuticals produce these drugs, i reckon it'd drive the scarcity of the drugs down, leading to their devaluation, and t…

On driving prices down, yes, on the market collapsing, you have clearly never interacted with an addict.

Selling drugs to an addict is in no way creating value for society. None. You're taking money that was hustled/stolen in order to leave someone worse off than if they got clean. It might be that legalization is better than the black market but what I'm contending here is that "just because you made money, does not mean you were serving society".

Re: LivingSocial: Employees' and Founders' Common Stock Now Worthless

#234

Post by argonaut »

jbooth wrote: post #233
chii wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lets talk about drug dealers. The drug market isn't really a free market. THere isn't really easy competition, the means of production is difficult for people to get into. The participants don't really want to do it sometimes, but is forced to. In fact, if the gov't legalized drugs, and let big pharmaceuticals produce these drugs, i reckon it'd drive the scarcity of the drugs down, leading to their devaluation, and t…

On driving prices down, yes, on the market collapsing, you have clearly never interacted with an addict. Selling drugs to an addict is in no way creating value for society. None. You're taking money that was hustled/stolen in order to leave someone worse off than if they got clean. It might be that legalization is better than the black market but what I'm contending here is that "just because you made money, does not…

Did you read my comment? Please define what you mean by "value, "worse off," and "serving society." Don't just throw those terms around expecting everyone else to share the exact same values as you.

Some examples: life, truth, and/or pleasure. If it's a combination, how do you prioritize?

Discussing "X has no value" is absolute garbage if you don't discuss "value."

Re: LivingSocial: Employees' and Founders' Common Stock Now Worthless

#236

Post by flyinRyan »

flyinRyan wrote: post #175
MichaelApproved wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I can't wait for these daily deal business to go away because I don't think it benefits anyone." If you don't like these deals, then don't use them but don't say that they don't benefit anyone. Customers benefit from these deals all the time. 50% off a meal is a great offer! I think the biggest problem with these deals (for the wait staff at a restaurant) is that people think they should tip based off the discounted…

>If you don't like these deals, then don't use When all your competitors are? Go make a business and try that strategy. >50% off a meal is a great offer! So great the company who set it up went right out of business despite an insane amount of funding. >I think the biggest problem with these deals (for the wait staff at a restaurant) is that people think they should tip based off the discounted meal, instead of the f…

NOTE: I don't live in the US anymore so I'm not affected by tipping. When I am there I do tend to tip but it pisses me off. Not because of the cost but rather the exploitation of me and the worker.

Re: LivingSocial: Employees' and Founders' Common Stock Now Worthless

#237

Post by flyinRyan »

jf22 wrote: post #176
flyinRyan wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter. Demand your value or you're lowing the market for yourself and everyone else who does what you do. You only have so many productive days in your life. Wasting them being exploited is throwing away money you can never get back. You think actors don't enjoy doing movies? Of course they do, but they expect to be compensated for it. You think sport players hate their sport and only play for the money?…

Of course it matters. Who wouldn't take a pay cut make 40 hours of their week more enjoyable?

I wouldn't. I'll never enjoy working for someone else as much as I do working for myself so I would never take a pay cut unless it was to start my own company.

Re: LivingSocial: Employees' and Founders' Common Stock Now Worthless

#238

Post by jarin »

tocomment wrote: post #171
jarin wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bombed on my interview there last year. Not feeling so bad about it now.

What went wrong at the interview? BTW, is this going to hurt the market for Django developers in DC?

I interviewed with three people. First, I interviewed with two developers, one of whom seemed like he may have been a manager. The questions that I think doomed me were questions about HTTP status codes and CSRF/XSS attacks.

The HTTP status code thing went something like "Why don't you name off some HTTP status codes?" So I rattled off the ones I knew off the top of my head, but then he asked me for more. It's the kind of question you can look up in about 30 seconds if you need to, but in an interview setting it's difficult to recall the ones you don't see often.

The manager guy also asked me to describe CSRF and XSS and the details of how those exploits work. I knew what they were, but I hadn't actually examined or written one before. I did learn about them inside and out when I completed the latest Stripe CTF though. I thought that question was reasonable, and I just didn't know it.

There were also some questions about caching in high-traffic environments, which I didn't know much about but I knew enough about it to tell them that I would be able to pick it up quickly. I don't think they liked when I admitted not knowing something though. It also seemed kind of interesting that there was so much emphasis on it since I wasn't interviewing to work with the main developer team but with one of their splinter offices who builds proofs of concept and prototypes.

I did pretty well on the rest of it, including the 2nd part of the interview with one of their in-house tool developers. There was supposed to be a third part where I would have interviewed with a non-developer to assess culture fit, but they ended my interview before that part.

I think I probably bombed it because I've been consulting for a long time and have a different development approach than they were looking for.

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