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I am not sure that is fair -- what if someone decided to buy out their vested shares with their own money? They would be screwed while those who borrowed from

I am not sure that is fair -- what if someone decided to buy out their vested shares with their own money? They would be screwed while those who borrowed from Bolt wouldn't be. It is just generally problematic.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
I am willing to bet no one did this.
- gumby 4y ago
  Procedurally: It's been fairly common at early stages of startups I've run but the amounts have always been so small (few thousand $) that it's not really commensurate. I also always put early exercise in the SOP (you can exercise immediately to start the LTCG period, and vesting just works in reverse: company can buy the shares back, and a fraction of that right lapses every month). This is part of the potential upside of working for an early stage startup. I agree when it's 10s of thousands or more the optionality isn't worth it for almost anyone. And it's hard to imagine borrowing to exercise could ever be worth it. I've never encouraged or discouraged any employee from making an exercise decision (I don't want to get the liability of giving tax or investment advice). I don't even encourage them to file 83(b) except that when I explain why it's a pain for the company if they don't do so, everyone has figured it out immediately :-).
- fragmede 4y ago
  Why not? Greed is universal and it's a chance to buy in for pennies on the dollar. We don't know their strike price or 409a or any of the other relevant details.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  Because the strike was high? Traditionally, it’s what you do at a startup if you’re early stage.
bombcar 4y ago
Sometimes being nice ends up being unfair. Given the "talk to us we'll work something out" part of the message I bet that's what Bolt is basically doing - in the cases where people are now "screwed" they're going to arrange for a grant or something to make people whole.
sfblah 4y ago
Same problem with the student loan forgiveness being pushed in the US currently. My cynical take is that they’d just do the forgiveness and refuse to talk about the people in the situation you described.
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  Most of the attitude I’ve seen to that situation is “tough luck, life isn’t fair”… seemingly oblivious to their original argument for forgiveness being it’s unfair they’re saddled with that debt.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    There’s no shortage of single-ply thinking in the world of politics.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    Politics is a numbers game, though, not a moral one. There are ~258M adults in the US. ~43M of them have student loans. Already you can see a problem. 17% is nowhere near a majority. If you are looking to make people happy and vote for you, targeting a 17% demographic is not an ideal strategy to begin with. But some amount of the remaining 83% had student loans and paid them off. Comments on HN and Reddit notwithstanding, a non-trivial fraction of those will be put off by a decision to forgive current student loans. Some other amount of people, probably a majority, never went to college to begin with. From their perspective, you just gave free money to a minority of people who were already privileged to begin with, by even being able to go to college at any price. This is not how you win elections, and politicians primarily exist to win elections. It is entirely possible that forgiving student loans would result in a net-negative change in votes in the next election, and maybe for a while after that. At the very least they need to fix the underlying problem before creating such a moral hazard, or the next round will be much bigger. If they really want to buy votes this way, it would probably be more effective to just give yet another stimulus -- a nice, big one -- to every voter in the country.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

I am willing to bet no one did this.

gumby 4y ago
Procedurally: It's been fairly common at early stages of startups I've run but the amounts have always been so small (few thousand $) that it's not really commensurate. I also always put early exercise in the SOP (you can exercise immediately to start the LTCG period, and vesting just works in reverse: company can buy the shares back, and a fraction of that right lapses every month). This is part of the potential upside of working for an early stage startup. I agree when it's 10s of thousands or more the optionality isn't worth it for almost anyone. And it's hard to imagine borrowing to exercise could ever be worth it. I've never encouraged or discouraged any employee from making an exercise decision (I don't want to get the liability of giving tax or investment advice). I don't even encourage them to file 83(b) except that when I explain why it's a pain for the company if they don't do so, everyone has figured it out immediately :-).
fragmede 4y ago
Why not? Greed is universal and it's a chance to buy in for pennies on the dollar. We don't know their strike price or 409a or any of the other relevant details.
renewiltord 4y ago
Because the strike was high? Traditionally, it’s what you do at a startup if you’re early stage.

bombcar 4y ago

Sometimes being nice ends up being unfair. Given the "talk to us we'll work something out" part of the message I bet that's what Bolt is basically doing - in the cases where people are now "screwed" they're going to arrange for a grant or something to make people whole.

sfblah 4y ago

Same problem with the student loan forgiveness being pushed in the US currently. My cynical take is that they’d just do the forgiveness and refuse to talk about the people in the situation you described.

whywhywhywhy 4y ago
Most of the attitude I’ve seen to that situation is “tough luck, life isn’t fair”… seemingly oblivious to their original argument for forgiveness being it’s unfair they’re saddled with that debt.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  There’s no shortage of single-ply thinking in the world of politics.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Politics is a numbers game, though, not a moral one. There are ~258M adults in the US. ~43M of them have student loans. Already you can see a problem. 17% is nowhere near a majority. If you are looking to make people happy and vote for you, targeting a 17% demographic is not an ideal strategy to begin with. But some amount of the remaining 83% had student loans and paid them off. Comments on HN and Reddit notwithstanding, a non-trivial fraction of those will be put off by a decision to forgive current student loans. Some other amount of people, probably a majority, never went to college to begin with. From their perspective, you just gave free money to a minority of people who were already privileged to begin with, by even being able to go to college at any price. This is not how you win elections, and politicians primarily exist to win elections. It is entirely possible that forgiving student loans would result in a net-negative change in votes in the next election, and maybe for a while after that. At the very least they need to fix the underlying problem before creating such a moral hazard, or the next round will be much bigger. If they really want to buy votes this way, it would probably be more effective to just give yet another stimulus -- a nice, big one -- to every voter in the country.