8 ms·

my equity from 2years pre-acquisition: ~$2800. Then the CEO gave out bonuses when everyone threatened to quit. Then after his 3 month vacation to Italy, he came

• dehrmann 1y ago
  At some point, aren't the C Suite and directors failing their fiduciary responsibility? I know they have broad freedoms, but when you're reducing an a minority shareholder's equity by 95%, it's well past "fiduciary responsibility" and looking like fraud.
  • fusslo 1y ago
    I am convinced every executive and wanna-be executive is on the 'inside joke' of funneling money out of the company into their pockets. I am also convinced that investors believe it's the C Suite's responsibility to tear away any equity from employees to leave the largest pot for investors.
    • mlinhares 1y ago
      Anyone that doesn't think this is delusional.
    • mikert89 1y ago
      ive been in these rooms and heard the conversations, employees are seen as disposable liabilities
      • toss1 1y ago
        YUP Terms and phrases I've heard verbatim from investors and/or founders: "There's a thousand ways to screw minority shareholdeers." "Cram-down" (repeatedly, like it is an ordinary thing to do, effectively repudiating or diluting away entire classes of debt and/or equity) "I hate to lie, but you often have to." (said as if there is no choice in the matter) "You have to screw the other guy before he screws you." "If there's a problem in a joint venture and you put out the resources to fix it, you're the chump." It is a good idea to not do business with people who say these kinds of things. It is delusional to think you will be the special one who they actually treat fairly and not be targeted by their greed and lack of ethics. If you are really lucky, you will escape and find an attny willing to take your case and win a lawsuit and still get to chase them for the judgement. The only winning move is to not play. (Not to say there are no honest ones, but it is really getting scarce, and many honest ones have left the biz.)
        • cindyllm 1y ago
          [dead]
    • droopyEyelids 1y ago
      This is what it means to own
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • RamblingCTO 1y ago
      Can confirm from my experience. Although not everyone is like this. Sent me into burnout that I didn't wanna be a dick and extract as much "value" from the employees by walking over them and fucking them over when the chance arises. It's always empty promises to string people along. From my experience, these people (the resource extraction dicks) are also some of the must unlikable and unhappy people I've ever met.
  • ojbyrne 1y ago
    Of course. So if you’re the employee, you’re going to sue? If so you’re paying for your lawyer, and the company is paying for theirs. Guess who goes broke first.
• lmeyerov 1y ago
  Sorry to hear that =/ Work for good people with a history of moral dealing. A family member just had a life-changing payout because leadership was generous. A friend walked away from a company pre-pivot without equity for what became one of the decade's biggest acquisitions. This stuff is lottery tickets, but real ones. You need to be smart about who you make your limited bets on. And agreed, big cautionary note here shows that Windsurf having "founder-friendly" investors does NOT mean employee-friendly ones.
• fermentation 1y ago
  I often see job postings here looking for "top <1% engineer talent" paying $100k and <1% equity and I wonder who is actually applying.
  • blittle 1y ago
    Not a 1% engineer
  • ageyfman 1y ago
    they have to say this to safe face. people who're interviewing most of the time can't even tell if it's a 50% engineer
  • ponector 1y ago
    No one will say: we are looking for cheap mediocre talent with no intention to grow, just to process assigned Jira tickets. Even if that is the actual truth in many cases.
• jongjong 1y ago
  I worked for an ed-tech startup as employee number 4, joined when it was obscure; not even in the Alexa top 4 million rankings and almost no revenue. The founder was really good though and gave everyone shares instead of options. I got a bit under 0.2% equity in the company. The company grew (slowly and steadily) to $6.5 million USD revenue with about 10% net profit margins but its last valuation (over 10 years later) was like $8 million USD. They charge like $15 USD PER YEAR PER student for their product so very cheap; I feel like they could easily increase the prices given how widely used they are in my country (over 30% of students in my country use the app). I had the option to sell some equity recently but it would have only been like $16K USD so I held... I had about $9K taken out of my salary to pay for those so it doesn't make sense to sell given the massive growth the app and not that much dilution... The financial gain barely covers the inflation. It feels like both revenue and profits have been kept artificially low. $6.5 million per year revenue, still growing steadily, with a loyal customer base with 10% profit seems really good... A valuation of $8 million seems ridiculously low... Not even 2x revenue, for a tech platform with good lock-in factor (they sell a lot of licenses to schools)! It's kind of amazing how bad a deal it is to work for someone else as an employee. Even if the founder is good and generous in many ways and the business side (which you have little control over as a developer) happens to work out pretty well, they can still pull all sorts of levers to make the deal bad. With this one, I'm going to wait it out 20 years if I must. A lot of the game is just timing, you gotta wait it out, sell at the top... Some people see a peak opportunity to cash-in multiple times in their lives, some people never see it! In my case, I haven't seen the top yet. I never had any opportunity to make serious money ever. Never had an opportunity to pull the trigger and make even $100K. The best I ever got was in crypto, my crypto was worth $100K but I was earning like 100% annual yield and required a 1-month unlock period. So I made more than that by holding it for 3 years anyway... I think my career story so far is quite interesting. Probably more interesting than 99% of the classic SV startup stories (at least what they say publicly). I've done some things nobody else has done. Made money in truly adverse environments where a lot of people hated my guts. I've seen people behave in strange ways. At times, I felt like I was almost breaking through the membrane of 'the matrix'; almost transcending my social class. But all I got for it was 3 years of passive income. I never had the opportunity to cash out big. It's tough out there, so tough, it often feels fake/artificial. Often, it feels like you have to be 'chosen' and that's all that matters. Your work doesn't matter, how talented you are doesn't matter, how lucky you get doesn't matter (besides the luck of 'being chosen'). At the end of the day, money is like a river and people upstream from you get to decide whether or not the river will flow in your direction. When you understand that new money is created constantly and, just like the river, the water cycles between the mountain and the sea, you start to understand the value of positioning and 'being selected'. The people upstream will keep telling you that they don't control the flow of money; that the river flows naturally through the lowest valleys... It's your job to put yourself in that low valley... But really, they've built massive dams up there directing the water almost arbitrarily. You may be at the lowest valley but they're redirecting the water elsewhere artificially because it suits them better. Reality is that they can easily alter the path of the river anywhere they want and it has little to do with 'building something people want'. It's about building something the people upstream want... And sometimes they just want to help their existing friends; unfortunate for you if you are not their friend. It's a catch-22; you need rich friends to get money but you need money to get rich friends. But I suspect it's way easier for a poor person to get rich by befriending a rich person than it is for a poor person to get rich without rich friends. The second approach feels like you're piercing through 'the matrix' because of all the weird almost conspiratorial resistance you might get (tech feels like one big club). Sometimes you might accumulate some dirt on some rich people and that gives you some leverage over them but it's the kind of leverage where you have to keep coming back to them to get crumbs. I feel like you can never break through that way due to regulatory capture. You can only do limited damage to them and it's always costly to you. They still have the balance of power.
• roncesvalles 1y ago
  I know this is HN but imo it's rarely ever a good deal to work at startups as an employee instead of a cofounder (with actual cofounder equity not just the title i.e. within the same order of magnitude as the largest-shareholding cofounder), over a bigger established company. The only good reasons to do so are if you want to learn or make contacts so that you can found your own startup later. In my pensive moments, one of the things about humans that makes me go "god damn" is how little money it takes for insanely talented people to just come and work for you.
  • DSingularity 1y ago
    I don’t think that’s entirely correct. You need to work with good people. There is no substitute for ethics. Also you need not go for roles where they offer .3 % and make a big deal about it. Don’t take less than 1% minimum and as soon as two years pass by and you have carried your weight start looking for a new job. If they value you they will bump you up. It they don’t you will bump yourself up by going for a new job. And don’t be afraid to go for competitors if you believe in the value of the space.
  • freeone3000 1y ago
    The startup I work for keeps my employment because they keep bidding competitively with the investment banks I would otherwise work for. They have the cash, if you have the leverage. Use it.
  • marssaxman 1y ago
    The other good reason is that you might enjoy the experience more than you would enjoy the stultifying, oppressive, slow-moving environment of a big corporation. That's why I keep doing it: I'm not expecting to get rich, I'm just trying to live a good life, and it's proven to be much easier for me to do that when I work for a startup. I value startup equity at ~$0, but if the salary is enough to live comfortably, that's fine.
• supportengineer 1y ago
  The fun part comes when you put in 20 years doing this, and your dream is to buy a nice house, and you finally get your seven-figure payout, and.... it's not enough to buy a house. Because now a house is 3 million dollars.
  • kstrauser 1y ago
    What kind of house had you been dreaming of? I live in SF, and even here $3M goes an awfully freaking long way.
    • anukin 1y ago
      Maybe OP wants a house in atherton next to andreessen.
      • gcanyon 1y ago
        I'm guessing it's a very select group of people who want a house next to Andreessen...
        • seattle_spring 1y ago
          If I had to, I would pay just to live away from that select group.
      • supportengineer 1y ago
        This is the cheapest house in Atherton at this moment $4.888 https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/86-Rittenhouse-Ave-Atherton-CA-94027/15580217_zpid/?utm_campaign=iosappmessage&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=txtshare https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/86-Rittenhouse-Ave-Athert...
        • BobaFloutist 1y ago
          $3m is a pretty decent down payment for that.
• ivape 1y ago
  Then after his 3 month vacation to Italy, he came back driving his new Ferrari. Hey, at least he’s taking his LARPing as a douchebag ceo seriously. Easy vip invite for DND nights.
• Hikikomori 1y ago
  Paid more taxes on RSUs than I'm going to get post IPO. Company took investments on insane COVID valuation and then needed more money posts COVID which tanked it.
• cornholio 1y ago
  The basic idea is that you either have stock, preferably founder levels from 10% up (which is itself a lottery ticket), or you hold retiree bingo cards. The retirement home provides the cards for your entertainment, but the real owners of the establishment, the founders and early investors, know the only way you can earn the big prize is at their expense, so they have a vested interest to see you fail - and they are the ones printing the bingo cards and setting the rules.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]