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The very first startup I joined after grad school allowed all employees to cash out significant chunks of their stock in the Series A round. Also Elon famously
by sashank_1509 2y ago
The very first startup I joined after grad school allowed all employees to cash out significant chunks of their stock in the Series A round.
Also Elon famously put 200 million of his own money into Tesla and SpaceX to keep it afloat, which is the opposite of cashing out early.
- romwell 2y ago> to keep it afloat Can't "cash out" (early or not) if your company is sinking.
- mapt 2y agoIf you have 200 million "of your own money" to spare, you are no longer just a person for the purposes of this conversation, you're a walking VC fund, and you're not really risking a substantial change to your quality of life going from 250M to 50M net worth. Your living expenses are already generously compensated for by the large salary that you, the VC fund pays you, the person, out of your personal bank account, and they will be paying you those expenses until the end of your natural life. This isn't "risk" in the same sense as somebody who jumps to supplement their $150k salary with $450k of founder liquidity because it dramatically changes the material security of their life.
- throwbigdata 2y agoLife is very different at $50M v $250M
- Tepix 2y agoIs it?
- BoorishBears 2y agoIt's not really compared to an average person's life, but in SV tradition never let the chance to subtly flaunt a wealth gap pass by freely (This is the part where you say "Yes, having lived both <insert revelation>")
- shermantanktop 2y agoHas 50M: wishes they had 250M Has 250M: wishes they had 1B
- gafferongames 2y agoTres Commas
- fooker 2y ago50m is the upper echelons of private chaffeur money, 250m is the lower echelons of private jet money.
- kelnos 2y agoIt depends on the kind of lifestyle you want to live, I guess. If you want to live in a $30M mansion estate with 24/7 domestic staff and have several vacation homes around the world, $50M might not cut it, while $250M should cover it just fine. If you have a philanthropic bent and want to be able to fund various charities to the tune of $5M or $10M per year (in addition to a reasonably luxurious lifestyle, though considerably less than the above hypothetical), $50M might not be enough to sustain that over time, but $250M probably will. I think it's fair to say that there's not much difference between net worths of $25M and $50M, or between $50M and $75M. But jumping an order of magnitude from $50M to $250M will let you live a very different kind of life, if you so choose.
- KennyBlanken 2y ago...while he was getting loaned $200,000 a month for personal expenses by his billionaire buddies. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/27/the-crucial-decision-teslas-elon-musk-had-to-make-when-he-was-broke.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/27/the-crucial-decision-teslas-... Also, that may have kept tesla and spacex 'afloat' but what really saved both companies was billions upon billions of dollars in government contracts, subsidies, preferential loans, and tax breaks. Nevada alone gave nearly two billion dollars to Tesla.
- petesergeant 2y agoThe government is expecting something in return for these breaks rather than them being some kind of gift, though.
- nick7376182 2y agoAnd the government got it, in the form of a cost effective usa-based launch solution.
- oblio 2y agoThe government is not monolithic and politicians might except other things than what their constituents want. It's a bad test of the value of an investment.
- petesergeant 2y agoFor sure, and it may well have been a terrible investment with terrible returns, but selling to the government and responding to government incentives is an entirely legitimate thing to do, rather than some kind of inherent weakness in a company’s model. A company being “saved” by a government contract is a company being saved by making sales to its largest customer.
- kelnos 2y agoExpecting, perhaps, but in general there's little to no penalty if those expectations are not realized.