751–760 of 943 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[citation needed] Frankly, many more aspects of trying to grow your career from l5-l7 are out of your hands than they are when you're at a startup.
The vast majority of startup success is luck... There are literally thousands of people going from L5-L7 at the major tech companies per founder successfully exiting a >$100M company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> making ~$1M per year working 6 hour days at FAANG Can you say more on this? I didn't realize FAANG TCO was quite that high. Maybe it's time to swallow some pride and take the adtech money after all...
See levels.fyi. The pay levels for FAANG companies are fairly accurate. But you'd have to be something like L7/E7 level at a Meta/Google to break $1M. Also note that some comp numbers get heavily inflated by people incorporating stock value increasing between the equity was first issued and the stock actually vested.
Yeah ever since COVID this has really muddied the water, partially both up and down. Depending on the year combined with the type of company (large cap vs growth SaaS vs finance) you can massively swing the same exact "offer comp" into many communicated effective comps.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious why you think these employees -- who are getting the worst end of the deal -- are working for startups in the first place? Either they have the skills to be a founder themselves or to work at BigTech... or they are financially ignorant/disinterested enough to not understand how equity in corporations work? Or is the charming and misleading founder who is to blame? My point is that considering the high avg…
I think the other thing to realize is that the change in this "startup calculus" has happened only relatively recently. The "old" calculus was that, being an early employee in a startup, you'd make less cash money than at a "big corp", but if the company "hit" you'd end up doing much better. Just look at the stories of early Microsoft employees, or the Google chef whose stock options ended up being worth tens of mill…
(This is not to imply that compensation is now fair for early startup employees; it's not.)
[1]: https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/
[2]: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious why you think these employees -- who are getting the worst end of the deal -- are working for startups in the first place? Either they have the skills to be a founder themselves or to work at BigTech... or they are financially ignorant/disinterested enough to not understand how equity in corporations work? Or is the charming and misleading founder who is to blame? My point is that considering the high avg…
I think the other thing to realize is that the change in this "startup calculus" has happened only relatively recently. The "old" calculus was that, being an early employee in a startup, you'd make less cash money than at a "big corp", but if the company "hit" you'd end up doing much better. Just look at the stories of early Microsoft employees, or the Google chef whose stock options ended up being worth tens of mill…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many huge private companies, like Stripe, have found ways to provide liquidity to their employees without going public, e.g., through tender offers. Some more recent examples of companies where early employees did very well would be AirBnB, Coinbase and DoorDash.
Early executives at those companies did very well. Early employees did well, but risk-adjusted , not really. I know people who were fairly early at those companies and they own nice SFH in the Bay Area but they're still working as Directors or whatever. Consider that if you could make 400k (including liquid stock) in compensation at FAANG but you take 180k at the startup, you're basically betting 220k a year on the c…
Even worse, your bet is on common shares. Far better to work at FAANG and Angel invest so you get preferential shares.
The biggest scam of VC is that the dollar value of your time is hugely undervalued compared to a $ from VC that gets preferential shares.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tends to be the one with more friends. That’s pretty much it. That’s the politicking.
Allies, not friends. In that sort of environment, what sort of things get you allies? other than what you mentioned. For example when you say gaming the process, how to approach reviews?
Posting from throwaway so I can be very open. I joined a YC startup as engineer #1 with close to $200k salary and 2% options vesting at the usual 4 years, with a 10 year window. I feel like this was bettern than usual, and for a while felt like I struck an awesome deal, but as time went on I realised I was building everything single-handedly, while getting (at best) 2%, which started to annoy me deep down. Over two y…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d say you’re uncommon. I’ve never seen anyone who is a typical engineer making $250k/yr at a startup that’s below $1B valuation. Same for the amount of work you’re doing and that it’s remote with that compensation. It’s possible you’d be making $700k+/yr if you were at google. About triple what you are now.
What many people don’t seem to realize is there are a lot of early stage but already well funded (10M+) startups who are desperately looking for top quality people. Once I was approached by a founder who offered 500k base salary (wasn’t a good fit for my area of expertise).
If someone's offering $500k/yr to an engineer plus stock, they're definitely trying to attain someone with very niche skills. Which begs the question: Just how applicable is this scenario for everyone else?
I haven't found many startup roles going past $200k for a fully remote engineer, almost regardless of level. I don't think they even try to get someone who would be Staff+ at FAANG because it's basically pointless.
Top quality in your scenario might mean niche skills like you've done specific computer vision work, have a PhD, and are going to a self-driving startup... Cool but not really applicable to most of us, is it?
Whereas compare as to how common it is to be a typical full stack or backend engineer with a decade of experience... join FAANG at Staff and make $600k+.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The options are exerciseable whenever they are vested (and if you are on good terms, sometimes before that). This can be a waste of money, or a huge boon in terms of taxes avoided.
In what circumstances would that be a huge boon, and how much risk / uncertainty is involved?
Exercise earlier: Strike price: $0.10 FMV at exercise: $0.20 Taxes: AMT on $0.10 gain (might be $0 in taxes) + Long term capital gains on $2.00-$0.10
Exercise at sale: Strike price: $0.10 Taxes: short term capital gains on $2.00-$0.10
Assuming a decently sized transaction: If your marginal rate is 35%, your long term capital gains rate might be 20%, saving you 15% of the sale price in taxes.
There is a risk that the money you pay to exercise ends up buying you worthless shares.
It all depends on the specific numbers. The longer you wait to exercise, the more likely you will have to pay significant AMT taxes (assuming increasing valuations) to the point where it no longer makes sense to exercise because you'd have to pay so much in AMT taxes for shares that may become worthless.
I gladly paid $10k to exercise so I could save $150k in taxes because I thought the odds were high that I would later be able to sell my shares for more than I paid.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may dislike Elon, but it's pretty absurd to say that what he did is trivial.
[flagged]
Nasa only contracted SpaceX because of that AND because SpaceX saves them billions of dollars from otherwise inefficient suppliers.
But that's not relevant.