931–940 of 943 posts
Wouldn't most 9-5 employees stop working if they had a sizable liquidity event?
Nice article, but it is wrong about liquidity events at WeWork. The author only discusses a tender offer that fell through at the end of 2019 after the failed IPO and collapse, implying there was nothing ever before. There was a tender offer in 2017 with the first SoftBank investment, and again in early 2019 (pre IPO attempt, closed in April) associated with the second investment by SoftBank. It is possible there wer…
Thank you for letting me know about this - I searched for other tender offers or liquidity for employees of WeWork and couldn't find anything (and the 2 former WeWork employees I know joined in late 2019 / 2020 - so they had a pretty terrible experience) I will re-work that section so that it's factually correct
If you have access (or have friends with access) to PitchBook, their file on WeWork would have comprehensive data about all the liquidity events.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If startup goes to zero, then everyone goes home with nothing. The founders typically don't lose any money of their own -- that cost is shouldered by angel and series-A investors. Often though, the startup has a "soft landing" where it's acquihired by a larger company, and then the founders typically get executive or very senior roles (with large bonuses, etc) meanwhile the non-founders get standard employee packages…
Yes, I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks the economics of it are a little bit broken. I will never join another start up as employee #1. I'd much rather come into a larger start up with a high cash comp + equity, than very low cash comp, worked to the bone. The other thing no one talks about is founders tend not to dilute themselves, but often early employees are diluted heavily.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
QQQ would have turned your 500k into 2.56M AAPL, NVDA (even without the recent events), MSFT, TSLA, NFLX, yeah sure. But out of those, only Apple and Microsoft were reasonable companies to put that kind of money into. I think you're not realizing that you're cherry-picking. I mean I think your point still stands with just looking at QQQ, but I'm just saying over embellishing hurts your argument, not helps.
Meh, this isn't a me vs. you situation. If you take value from my overall comment, great. If you think my whole comment is invalidated by one statement that you do not believe, I'm not interested in defending it.
I must be an idiot, I've been a cofounder or first hire in 6 startups (2 successful) over the last 25 years and have literally never been offered secondary during a Seed or Series A or B.
How has your time in startups panned out? Were those 2 successes worth the failures?
On the other hand, I can't stand how corporate politics corrupt a product's vision. Even low-level politics like "strategy taxes" are infuriating.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may dislike Elon, but it's pretty absurd to say that what he did is trivial.
[flagged]
> "It is unlikely that these gaps can be closed until the end of the decade."
I actually worked out my own BFR plan over the couple years of teasers we had leading up to the 2016 IAC presentation. It was based on a 3-part vehicle a bit like Soyuz (separate hab and capsule) of 15m diameter for the launcher and 12m diameter for the upper stage, payload, and capsule, which seemed to offer more options than a 2-part vehicle.
Musk makes some very optimistic plans, some of them clearly without doing the math, and each numerically extraordinary aspect renders the other numerically extraordinary aspects more difficult to believe. Even if you can class 80 or 90% of his ideas as "Audacious but feasible", there are frequent areas where he gets ahead of himself and projects unlikely extremes that become numerical impossibilities in conjunction with each other.
What is clear is that you can launch a colony on Mars based around Starship-like vehicles, but the number of launches per human Mars resident to sustain and switch them out is large ("100 colonists per launch vehicle" is wildly overshooting; Keeping 100 colonists alive for a return mission will require hundreds of Starship-sized launches, some of them years in advance), the risks are large, and that the missions are at minimum conjunction-class (a 3 year round trip) rather than opposition class. A colony that attempts to grow until it approaches self sufficiency demands lots and lots of automation, an expansive ISRU, mining, and agricultural industry, and a population of maybe ~10^4 people; Getting there is going to demand literally 10^5 to 10^6 launches, decades of work, and 10^4 to 10^5 reusable launch vehicles in play for decades.
But it's got to start somewhere; Hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit like "Flags and footprints" and "We can save some cost by using a once-in-a-decade Venus orbital assist" and "We can fit a manned Mars program into a 20 billion dollar NASA budget in theory" does not colonize other planets at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Have you been an employee in a startup? Because in my experience it has a lot of the downs of the founder, but none of the ups. Have you been a founder? If not, I'm not sure you fully realize what goes into the job. Everyone wants to be a founder, but nobody wants to _be_ a founder.
> I'm not sure you fully realize what goes into the job. Can it be a lot worse than working as many hours as possible and burning out? Because startup employees do that, without the compensation the founders get.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where would the stress come from? You get a paycheck and there is no personal downside except opportunity cost (and perhaps reputation). You don’t lose any money if your startup fails.
A lot of people (esp people that performed extremely well in school and in corporate environment) find "failing" and "losing reputation" very stressful.