301–310 of 329 posts
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Why is it capital gains?
Because he is either selling his shares in the company, or the individual assets owned by the company, either way it should be taxed as capital gains.
Author here. I'm happy to answer any questions about this post, the sale process, or my time running TinyPilot.
Also, can you recommend or refer the law firm that you used for the transaction paperwork?
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> Family of four, living in Oregon, non-smoking, our premium is ~$1k/month. Granted it’s a high deductible ($12k), but it protects us from the kind of catastrophic emergency that could wipe out our savings. We are fortunate to not have expensive, ongoing conditions. Family of two, living in the EU, non-smoking, our premium is ~€0/month. Granted it's a €0 deductible, but it protects us from the kind of catastrophic em…
Are you unemployed? Otherwise, this is just not true. Assuming OP and his wife earn average incomes for academics in the US, they'd pay 2x ~920 USD per month in Germany, totaling 80% more than the premium and only 9% less than the worst case scenario of OP having to pay the full deductible.
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$400k for Senior is an outlier. According to Levels.fyi - and my personal contacts - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra... Median TC - something just-south of $300k TC (not salary) is more likely. Furthermore, the higher you go, a greater proportion comes as RSUs, not cash - even if it was $400k TC, a good chunk of that is money you literally can't spend for a couple of years.
Vesting for each grant starts at one year and is monthly after that. So you're really only waiting one year for the first big chunk of stock to be liquid. 400k TC at Google means that you have 400k (pre-tax) liquid at the end of the year (depending on the stock price, which has historically gone up).
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$400k for Senior is an outlier. According to Levels.fyi - and my personal contacts - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra... Median TC - something just-south of $300k TC (not salary) is more likely. Furthermore, the higher you go, a greater proportion comes as RSUs, not cash - even if it was $400k TC, a good chunk of that is money you literally can't spend for a couple of years.
Oh dude, Levels is so out of date! Don't actually use it for serious negotiation. Levels systemically removes "outlier" offers, and people with good offers don't post until they leave 2 years later. So there's a huge lagging+dampening factor when you use Levels. It should be more of a "minimum offer" calibration. $500k for senior (L5) is kind of the expected offer these days. If you are interviewing at FAANG you are…
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Stock price growth isn't a huge distinguishing factor unless you're acknowledging that we're looking in hindsight and expect that he would have been one of the employees to leave those equity grants in GOOG shares and never touch them. Anyone can convert realized gains to Google stock (including the slightly better GOOGL shares instead of the GOOG shares most employees get from their RSUs), and the fees for convertin…
You're right it's not huge but (in hindsight) it's not negligible either. Because the vesting schedule is 4 years for each grant, the employees have no choice but to leave the shares in GOOG for 1-4 years.
The vesting is unrelated. With no promotions or raises the 4yr bump is uninteresting. With those, they match your TC, but they happen _during_ those interesting career events. They describe some subset of your compensation for the next 4yrs. You can still invest them however you choose. You can still leave at any time (unless you believe that in your personal case the promotion train is better than the job-hopping train). You could have just as easily job-hopped and invested the surplus in GOOG.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh dude, Levels is so out of date! Don't actually use it for serious negotiation. Levels systemically removes "outlier" offers, and people with good offers don't post until they leave 2 years later. So there's a huge lagging+dampening factor when you use Levels. It should be more of a "minimum offer" calibration. $500k for senior (L5) is kind of the expected offer these days. If you are interviewing at FAANG you are…
Whet is the typical faang vesting cadence in your experience and are refreshers at meets typically near 25% of the initial grant?
Vesting cadence is typically quarterly or monthly.
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Whet is the typical faang vesting cadence in your experience and are refreshers at meets typically near 25% of the initial grant?
Refreshers at meets are typically 25% of the "standard" grant (so your comp will go down after 4 years unless you have outstanding performance or your director gives you an Additional Equity grant) Vesting cadence is typically quarterly or monthly.
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Congratulations! > Yeah, from what I've heard, SaaS businesses sell for a much higher multiple, often selling as a multiple of revenue rather than earnings. Adding some color as I have been through the process of selling a SaaS. Based on what you have written, at that stage of development, multiple on SDE is most common. 2.4x is on the low side for growing SaaS businesses, but this business is hardware with real COGS…
From the Quiet Light site, the SaaS multiples are in the 4 to 4.5x income range, which is still incredibly low. They have one for sale that involves 5 hr a week work for just over 4x multiple. Not really worth selling for that amount unless desperate or wanting to retire.
Valuation also depends heavily on components of a particular business, so it's not useful to just use one range. Does the business require the owner to run, or is a management team in place? Does it generate its revenue from 1,000 paying customers or 25? What is churn like? How fast is it growing? And bigger companies tend to have less risk in general than very small companies. FEI guides to a range of 7x - 10x for SaaS > $2m valuation (yes, this is somewhat recursive). The high end of that range is about a third the multiple Microsoft gets, but then again these are small businesses without Microsoft's competitive moats.
FE International[1] and Acquire.com[2] routinely publish excellent valuation guides for SaaS companies. I highly recommend to anyone looking to build or buy a SaaS.
1 - https://feinternational.com/blog/saas-metrics-value-saas-bus...
2 - https://blog.acquire.com/acquire-biannual-acquisition-multip...