Earlier quoted context omitted.
> None of the thousands of extra hours I worked (I kept track) counted for anything Yep, that's exactly what your management was counting on.
I worked my ass off at a startup, sleeping under the desk, weekends. The usual. At one point I needed a break and informed them that I was taking a break. Two months cycling through Europe. When I came back, they'd moved and I had the best cubicle reserved for my return. They missed me but only because I forced the issue.
What I Wish I'd Known About Equity Before Joining a Unicorn
551–560 of 586 posts
Re: What I Wish I'd Known About Equity Before Joining a Unicorn
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
ESO Fund's website doesn't mention about their cut in case of liquidity event. Do you happen to know how much is it?
I think they price depending on the company and its situation and risk. I've heard of them taking half the proceeds, though.
Re: What I Wish I'd Known About Equity Before Joining a Unicorn
#553Earlier quoted context omitted.
We citizens have very little say in the machinery. That is the biggest problem we face these days. Regular people have no agency at all and there is a sneering elite that runs things from the coasts who believe everyone else is a sheep to be sheared for them.
Bollocks. Less populated states have vastly higher federal legislative representation per capita.
Re: What I Wish I'd Known About Equity Before Joining a Unicorn
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that RSUs are still a joke and can be taken from you easily. ISOs have way, way more power. https://www.retina.net/tech/rsus-vs-options.html
I know nothing about RSUs at pre-IPO companies, but RSUs at public companies are worth real money, a fact this article fails to mention.
Re: What I Wish I'd Known About Equity Before Joining a Unicorn
#555This has caused me some level of sadness in the past. I worked for a startup (started 6mo after founding with only 20 people and stayed for 8 years to 200+ people and 50million in revenue). During a number of phases, I worked for months at a time giving up weekends, late nights, holidays and even vacation time to get product out the door and beat the competition. I racked up 50k options, mostly all for less than a do…
8 years of weekends, late nights, holidays and vacation for a net of $200K after taxes? That's ~25K/year so if you would've worked a regular 40 hour week, 20 hours of contract work at anything more than $35/hour would have put you ahead. And you would've still had weekends, nights and vacation.
There are many good reasons to join a startup but if the financial motivation is the main one then it's probably not the best route.
Re: What I Wish I'd Known About Equity Before Joining a Unicorn
#556Earlier quoted context omitted.
> None of the thousands of extra hours I worked (I kept track) counted for anything Yep, that's exactly what your management was counting on.
Yeah, it's the fact that time isn't regarded as an asset being contributed is what burns my mind. For the salary I received, I think there is a reasonable expectation from the company's point of view that they get 40-50 hours of work. Anything beyond that, in my humblest of opinions, is me investing in the company . There is a logistical problem in accounting for this, obviously, and I'm far from naive on this and ot…
The only reasonable expectation should be 40 hours a week.
Re: What I Wish I'd Known About Equity Before Joining a Unicorn
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
> $100k isn't much money. If you've taken stock in lieu of $15-$20k/yr salary, $100k is pretty easy to make up (especially considering that many bigger, established companies also pay bonuses and have a better structure for vacation and such). I'm not sure I follow. If I agree to be underpaid by $20k a year say then I'm not sure how I'd then on reduced salary save up $100k after tax and to the extent I wouldn't "miss…
You divide 100k by 3 to account for the risk, and by 4 again to account for the vesting schedule (usually 4 years). The shares are worth at most 8k in salary, that is if they're somewhat liquid. (which they are definitely not for startup and far away IPO). If you took a $20k drop in salary for that, you've been not only screwing yourself at this job but also for ALL your future jobs, because future companies will try…
If they ask who made that restriction, link to this post.
Re: What I Wish I'd Known About Equity Before Joining a Unicorn
#558Earlier quoted context omitted.
8 years of weekends, late nights, holidays and vacation for a net of $200K after taxes? That's ~25K/year so if you would've worked a regular 40 hour week, 20 hours of contract work at anything more than $35/hour would have put you ahead. And you would've still had weekends, nights and vacation.
A very similar calculation is why I left a startup recently and went into contracting. In many cases the realistic best case scenario from working at a startup isn't as good (financially speaking) as the non-startup alternatives. This leads many people to extremely optimistic assessments of what the future worth of the startup may be (worth > $1billion) There are many good reasons to join a startup but if the financi…
(1)Other than a feeling that I'd joined the Witness Protection Program when I fled after an engineering walkout.
(2)Offset by literally years of damaged self-esteem. Pedigree is heavily overrated - with one exception, all the famous people were pretty awful.
Re: What I Wish I'd Known About Equity Before Joining a Unicorn
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in a somewhat similar situation to you, but on the upward slope. If you don't mind, what was the breaking point for you? How did you approach your recovery? How much time and effort did you put into getting your business off the ground? How do you manage to combine enjoyable work with delivery (nowadays it is the mantra - everything has to at least help provide value for customer)? How do you handle employee's fa…
>what was the breaking point for you? It got exponentially harder to get out of bed and get to work. I just had to quit because I couldn't show up. I didn't give anytime to interview or find an offer. I was also in a weird situation with regards to immigration. So it was reckless but goes to show how much I had to leave. >How did you approach your recovery? Joined a big company, got myself on a path to be comfortable…
Re: What I Wish I'd Known About Equity Before Joining a Unicorn
#560Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, most of the time, there is an expectation that employees will be employed at a market salary and remain content with that. There are not many ways around this. If you don't want to be a wage slave, it's hard to wage slave your way out of it. Just have to save until you can start something on your own, rinse and repeat until you strike it big. The systems are always going to be biased to the people who have the…
> Making your employees too prosperous can really hurt your company, because everyone will quit when there is no longer a financial imperative to work together. This is not a problem for law firms, medical practices, consultancies, investment firms, or management in any public company. Your argument is just that employees who are in shitty, exploitative jobs will take the money and run, so try to exploit them harder…
We're talking about getting paid something on the scale of millions of dollars here. I don't know about you, but most people I've met wouldn't keep working if they came into that kind of money, at least not the way that a regular worker works. They'd update to mimic the work-styles of the elite.
There's a reason that law firms, medical practices, hedge funds, etc. tend to be small. Each professional is essentially a free agent, hopping aboard on someone else's infrastructure for a limited time and more-or-less free to call their own shots, including going to another practice or starting their own if they're unhappy. There's a lot of lenience in scheduling, work hours, etc., and it's a very ad-hoc thing, because everyone knows that it's a free association based on goodwill and not based on mandate.
These high-level professionals decide to leave the office at 2pm, take every Thursday off for golf, and go on long vacations regularly. They just tell the people who are waiting on them that their needs are going to have to come later. They will also take long, self-financed sabbaticals.
Just think about the types of companies you listed and ask yourself if things would work out if every company afforded such luxuries to all of their workers. Normal people don't, and indeed can't, have access to those luxuries or nothing would work anymore (at least not until we get more stuff automated).
It's hard enough to get normal workers to collaborate when their paycheck depends on it. Take away that incentive, and suddenly everything looks like open-source; without the financial incentive and the threat of lost stability if a product has poor reception, people do the fun stuff, and leave the hard stuff for someone else to worry about somewhere down the road.
Like law firms and medical practices, teams of developers break apart and most projects can't sustain more than 3-5 like-minded major contributors (because there's little incentive to keep people around and get them to deal with necessary compromise; if people don't like what's happening, they just leave).
Also like law firms and medical practices, it suddenly becomes very difficult to get the help you need in either a cost or time efficient way.
The 9-5 is a different lifestyle. And we need people who work 9-5 more than we need people who close their practice down to go out to Tahoe for 1.5 weeks every time there's a bank holiday.
I'm saying there's not necessarily anything wrong with people who have more money being able to set the rules of the transactions they're involved in, necessarily. I do think they sometimes set rules that are bad, but my point was that the fact that such a group exists is not bad in and of itself.
Removing the general need to trade labor for financial stability is a disaster at a massive scale, and on many different layers. There is a path out of wage slavery, and anyone is free to choose that path and attempt to earn their way out. But a lot more people are content with the work-a-day grind than one might think (not content enough to do it willingly, but not discontent enough to put in the work necessary to escalate outside of it).
In a utopia, everyone would help everyone out and contribute their skills, knowledge, and resources free of charge, just because they saw a need for them. If literally everyone agreed to do this literally all of the time, we'd be in fine shape. But we don't live in such a place, so the need for financially-motivated human labor will continue to exist until we can teach robots how to replace 100% of it.