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Employee Equity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: Employee Equity

#281

Post by michaelochurch »

thrAway0101 wrote: post #247
michaelochurch wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wasn't talking about myself, or Google.

I wasn't even on a PIP at Google.

You launched a personal attack on me for no reason. The conclusion I'm left with is that you're probably an asshole.

Re: Employee Equity

#282

Post by humanrebar »

wwweston wrote: post #131
marvin wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone stopped to think what a massive failing of the startup part of the industry this is? Practically everything I read online indicates that if you consider your stock options to have any value at all even in a moderately successful company, you are a major sucker and about to get exploited. Surely this must reduce the quality of the talent pool available to new startups, as the experienced developers conclude…

Clearly Sam Altman and a few other people in thread have stopped to think about this. :) Part of what he's telling people here is "look, your competition for the engineers who can help you deliver includes Google and Facebook, your expected value has to be comparable to what they can offer." Of course, that's still talking about equity, which gets back to the fact that it really is best to treat your equity as little…

The labor pool skews young in SV and NYC, possibly because the only way to keep the cost of living down is to have multiple roommates, which does not work for someone with a family. In more suburban places, the age distribution seems in line with an industry that is as new as software is.

Re: Employee Equity

#283

Post by michaelochurch »

ZoF wrote: post #224
michaelochurch wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. If you're "not working up to potential" you may not get fired but you're not going to be promoted. If you drop from a 9 to 7, people notice the -2 delta because changes in performance are much easier to pick up than absolute performance. I'm (mildly) bipolar. The highs hurt me more at work than the lows. The lows I can push through and compensate for. I have a strong enough work ethic that except in an abs…

If it's not to personal; do you have any anecdotal indications as to why your bipolar improved after your early twenties?(or rather; why you haven't had a bout of extreme depression since then)

Some mood disorders come on gradually and get worse with time. Others hit hard in the teens and 20s and become less severe in adulthood, sometimes remitting around 50. Treatment helps, exercise is important, and the most important thing to remember is that there's no silver bullet but that a multi-pronged approach (medication, CBT, exercise, yoga/meditation, cutting toxic friends and making good ones, good sleep habits, avoiding drugs including alcohol) can make your life a lot better.

My genetic pattern seems to show more debilitation in the 20s. Unfortunately, some people don't recover from the damage (to health and career) done in that phase. I seem to have made it through the worst, though.

It was in my late 20s that I learned to live with an unstable mood. Sometimes I'll have a panic attack (10 minutes of extreme adrenal excitement for no reason) or a depression attack (an intense 2-4 hour bout of depression that, while leaving me exhausted, seems to leave no lasting mark) but I take a zen approach. Yes, this is actually happening, and it's just emotion. Easier said than done, for sure, but it's an ongoing practice.

Panic attacks I think of as a stern, somewhat obnoxious teacher whose motivations I haven't figured out yet. What makes panic scary is that it can imitate pretty much any physical disease. Phantom smells, visual flashing, chest pain, balance problems, paresthesia, vertigo, vomiting, blurry vision. I've had pretty much all of that shit. Over time, you learn that it's not dangerous. Then it becomes an annoyance (like a traffic jam) rather than a source of terror.

I don't think of myself as disabled by it. Most creative people are on the bipolar spectrum (although two thirds are probably sub-clinical). I don't lose work time to it, and my "never flake" rule keeps it from being too disruptive. I think of myself as traveling the same road as everyone else, but in winter rather than summer. And there are things you can see more clearly when the trees are bare and the air is crisp.

Re: Employee Equity

#284

Post by mbillie1 »

tptacek wrote: post #258
droopyEyelids wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a weird bit of advice. From my experience I have to assume you're saying "HR isn't the decision maker when hiring in elite tech companies" but the fact of the matter is HR/Recruiting is going to present the offer to most people, and it takes a career worth of preparation to move the conversation beyond that offer.

Well, I'm happy to have moved you a "career's worth" of wisdom forward in a single comment. You aren't negotiating with HR. HR does not know what you do, and HR's best idea of what you're worth comes from those ridiculous salary survey sites.

This is a cogent point. HR may be your point of contact for your salary negotiation, but they are not the decision maker or barrier. Ask for more money and they will ask someone else for more money on your behalf. HR is almost never the enemy in less-than-huge companies (and even then only moderately at worst).

Re: Employee Equity

#285

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #258
droopyEyelids wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a weird bit of advice. From my experience I have to assume you're saying "HR isn't the decision maker when hiring in elite tech companies" but the fact of the matter is HR/Recruiting is going to present the offer to most people, and it takes a career worth of preparation to move the conversation beyond that offer.

Well, I'm happy to have moved you a "career's worth" of wisdom forward in a single comment. You aren't negotiating with HR. HR does not know what you do, and HR's best idea of what you're worth comes from those ridiculous salary survey sites.

[deleted]

Re: Employee Equity

#286

Post by sergiosgc »

coffeemug wrote: post #216
webwright wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I remember PG telling me that large founding teams (more than 3) were highly correlated with failure. If I were to guess why: The more relationships you have on the founding team, the more likely you are to have ONE of them blow up or have someone lose their nerve/interest. Early startups are fragile things. Seems like you could go with a hybrid approach (start with 2-3 founders, raise a small amount or s…

> I feel like I remember PG telling me that large founding teams (more than 3) were highly correlated with failure. They usually are, but the median is not the message. If it's a group of college friends coming together to start a company for the first time, 2-3 people is way better than 4-5. But if you've worked with a few people before, know them well, and know how to set up expectations on day one, you can success…

At 4 or 5 founders, it hinges on group dynamics, not just the individual personalities of the founders. You need excellent communication, clear commitment, and you absolutely need two characters in the mix:

- A "negotiator". The kind of personality that is always mending the cracks that inevitably appear in the group.

- A visionary. The kind of personality that is incredibly optimist and always has the destination and the path in view.

Smaller groups can forfeit these needs and function, and are thus easier to assemble.

I've never seen groups larger than five succeed, and I've seen quite a few fail.

Re: Employee Equity

#287

Post by hga »

ZoF wrote: post #224
michaelochurch wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. If you're "not working up to potential" you may not get fired but you're not going to be promoted. If you drop from a 9 to 7, people notice the -2 delta because changes in performance are much easier to pick up than absolute performance. I'm (mildly) bipolar. The highs hurt me more at work than the lows. The lows I can push through and compensate for. I have a strong enough work ethic that except in an abs…

If it's not to personal; do you have any anecdotal indications as to why your bipolar improved after your early twenties?(or rather; why you haven't had a bout of extreme depression since then)

Based on a variety of things including family history, my doctors and I believe I have "depression of a bipolar nature" ; not true bipolar but something akin that only expresses itself as depression. Based on his posting just now, it's very different from what he has, except for the "depression attacks", which perhaps got better with time, and definitely got better with anti-depressants, which generally cannot be prescribed to those who are frankly bipolar (and in my case one actually made me hypomanic, that's mania without hallucinations).

The #1 thing you can do to at least not help drive yourself deeper into depression is to learn cognitive therapy, which nowadays has a "behavioral" aspect added to it that I'm not familiar with (this is the CBT Michael refers to in his message composed at the same time as mine). Buy this book; I keep extra copies to give to people: http://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-The-Mood-Therapy/dp/03808...

If you're truly bipolar, there's no substitute for a doctor's care as well, you'll probably need a mood stabilizer, of which there are many varieties from the "gold standard" of lithium to modern atypical anti-psychotics.

Re: Employee Equity

#288

Post by hga »

kamaal wrote: post #246
brudgers wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scenario is little different from any other where someone lacks a controlling interest. Controlling interests can sell the company to another company they control at a price that suits their interests. They can issue shares to dilute equity and use the shares to acquire a company which they also control. Any legal action agaist such practices can be defended on the company's dime. In other words, if scumbags cont…

>>Fortunately, most people aren't scumbags. No one is. But money changes things. Let's there are two best friends, you offer the first person some money to back stab the other. The guy may not agree. However keep raising the offer and at some point of time when the figure hits a $X0/$X00 million I bet the guy's intentions will change. Every one sells, its just the number that differs.

No, some people are "scumbags". I once worked for a company that suddenly ran out of it's startup money source and was forced to do a deal with a couple of "angel" investors ... who turned out to be devils.

They wrote into the agreement certain metrics that the company would have to meet after launch, and did everything they could to prevent it reaching those, e.g. firing the guy would would have made the sales, our multi-talented lawyer stepped up and made them. When Kleiner Perkins, who's connections could have been a make or break for the company, cold called us, these devils blew them off.

Their attitude was they'd rather have 100% of nothing (well, they probably thought it would have been something), and the company essentially died when 13 of us resigned en masse from the CEO down to all but one most junior engineer. (And then we had to go to the state to get our back pay for that partial pay period.)

I was in some of the last minute, try to save things face to face negotiations; these guys were malevolent. Not sure how they achieved net worths of 100 million and 500 million, but if they retained any control, they sure didn't use that money for good.

Re: Employee Equity

#289

Post by nl »

username223 wrote: post #255
tptacek wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HR people do not as a rule do salary negotiation. You have to be a particularly "special" degree of bad at negotiating to end up out-negotiated by an HR person. I am sure there are companies that, by outward appearance, do have candidates negotiating with HR people after the interview is over. Step 1 in handling negotiation with those companies: realize that you are not negotiating with HR.

If your Human Resources people don't play a significant role in purchasing your human resources, something has gone wrong.

1000 times, no.

HR is there to make sure you know where the toilets are. They can't pick a Javascript programmer, nor can they decide what to pay for one.

Re: Employee Equity

#290

Post by jknightco »

bane wrote: post #189
jstrate wrote: post #69

I've worked at two startups, including one YC. Both were acquired by larger tech companies. I was employee #3 at one and rebuilt most of a broken codebase in the other. I got nothing out of either WRT options. I agree with the author on point 4 but I don't think more options are the answer, I should have just asked for a higher salary I would have been better off. Startup-bucks are even worse than a lottery ticket, b…

I worked at a few also and managed to get a little money out of options, but nothing to write home about. I think after one company sold I got my payout and bought a new computer and a nice dinner and that was it. I'm actually sitting on a huge pile of vested options at a company I left a few years ago, but I'm unlikely to ever exercise them during a sale because the strike price is almost guaranteed to be higher tha…

Maybe I'm mistaken, but I believe you only have 90 days after leaving a company to purchase vested options. I may be wrong, however.
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