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Wow, talk about lost opportunity. I can only assume you're willing to talk about leaving so much money on the table because you got some other windfall a few ye

Wow, talk about lost opportunity. I can only assume you're willing to talk about leaving so much money on the table because you got some other windfall a few years later!

georgemcbay 12y ago
Or it could just be that he doesn't base his entire self-worth on how much money he has accumulated or view himself as a failure because he hasn't maximized said money. I don't know which it is myself, so my presented theory is just as speculative as yours, but -- and I know this might be a big surprise to some here -- you can live a very comfortable, happy life without ever being a legitimate early-retirement-capable dozens-of-millionaire.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Or cause, whatcha gonna do? I had 25% of a company, let myself get pushed out. New owners did a good job turning it around, sold it for over $20M. I ended up getting a few K. While not as clear-cut as making more money would have required positive action on my part, eh, well, this was years ago and just serves as a lesson. Or when Bitcoin was cheap and CPU-capable and I started a 64-core mining setup but figured I'd only make a few hundred BTC a month and turned the system off cause a hundred bucks a month wasn't worthwhile (even though I wasn't paying for the hardware/electricity). Including throwing away whatever I had mined so far (a block or two?). Oops. Or another settlement, that's under NDA. Or not taking this prototype software I had (that's actually now powering the tech support of voice division of a public telco) and turning it into a commercial offering because I figured the tech was too easy. Then finding a similar solution with 1/100th the performance sold for around $21M. I prefer to try to view these as inspirations, that opportunities are around and even random "nobodies" can end up in the right place by moving at the right time.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Not sure why your getting voted down but once you've experienced the ups and downs of equity value it gets to be quite noisy. So the car I sold to used car dealer which I "paid" 1.6M for was replaced by another car I had bought using some stock money I got from a company that had acquired my startup, when I sold that car 5 years later the stock used to buy the car was worth a bit less than $400. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but the reality was "Hey, I've got a car and no car payments." which at the time was relevant. The message is very much that getting "rich" doesn't really matter if you're the founder or a later employee, and its pretty random with respect to "skill". If you happened to be at Sun in the 80's and you sold your stock in the late 90's you made a lot, if you kept it until Oracle bought the remains, you made much less. Same stock different value. (and yes I had a wee bit of stock left when Oracle bought them) What I learned from that was that making money in the stock market was about targeting a gain and capturing it. So when Facebook went public I bought some at $18 and told my financial advisor to sell it if it ever hit $36 (which it did of course). So for that part of my portfolio I made a bit more than a 100% annual rate of return for that one stock. Its up to $81 today, at some point it will likely be worthless. But for me, it took some of my money and doubled it in less than a year. Good enough for me. But the Ask HN post is about whether or not equity compensation is "worth it" and the answer in the Bay Area has always been "yes". How much, or how little, extra it is, varies but as long as you wait to exercise and make a profit (yes you pay a bigger tax burden but its always a positive amount of money) it is just "extra" money that you got in addition to your pay. It it worth to work for stock instead of pay? That is a much riskier deal and probably not if you can't afford to pay your own bills independently. And do you have to work at a "startup" to get a big boost out of equity value? Absolutely not.
- hkarthik 12y ago
  Yeah not sure where the down votes are coming from, but I appreciate your response and I think it's great advice for the folks in this thread. When I was in my early twenties I scraped together about $5K which I was planning to invest in the Google IPO and instead used it to buy my wife her engagement ring. Today that stock might have been worth $50K or more. So while some may see it as lost opportunity, I've enjoyed a wonderful marriage for 10 years as a result of that decision, and I don't regret it one bit.

Wow, talk about lost opportunity. I can only assume you're willing to talk about leaving so much money on the table because you got some other windfall a few years later!

georgemcbay 12y ago

Or it could just be that he doesn't base his entire self-worth on how much money he has accumulated or view himself as a failure because he hasn't maximized said money. I don't know which it is myself, so my presented theory is just as speculative as yours, but -- and I know this might be a big surprise to some here -- you can live a very comfortable, happy life without ever being a legitimate early-retirement-capable dozens-of-millionaire.

MichaelGG 12y ago
Or cause, whatcha gonna do? I had 25% of a company, let myself get pushed out. New owners did a good job turning it around, sold it for over $20M. I ended up getting a few K. While not as clear-cut as making more money would have required positive action on my part, eh, well, this was years ago and just serves as a lesson. Or when Bitcoin was cheap and CPU-capable and I started a 64-core mining setup but figured I'd only make a few hundred BTC a month and turned the system off cause a hundred bucks a month wasn't worthwhile (even though I wasn't paying for the hardware/electricity). Including throwing away whatever I had mined so far (a block or two?). Oops. Or another settlement, that's under NDA. Or not taking this prototype software I had (that's actually now powering the tech support of voice division of a public telco) and turning it into a commercial offering because I figured the tech was too easy. Then finding a similar solution with 1/100th the performance sold for around $21M. I prefer to try to view these as inspirations, that opportunities are around and even random "nobodies" can end up in the right place by moving at the right time.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Not sure why your getting voted down but once you've experienced the ups and downs of equity value it gets to be quite noisy. So the car I sold to used car dealer which I "paid" 1.6M for was replaced by another car I had bought using some stock money I got from a company that had acquired my startup, when I sold that car 5 years later the stock used to buy the car was worth a bit less than $400. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but the reality was "Hey, I've got a car and no car payments." which at the time was relevant. The message is very much that getting "rich" doesn't really matter if you're the founder or a later employee, and its pretty random with respect to "skill". If you happened to be at Sun in the 80's and you sold your stock in the late 90's you made a lot, if you kept it until Oracle bought the remains, you made much less. Same stock different value. (and yes I had a wee bit of stock left when Oracle bought them) What I learned from that was that making money in the stock market was about targeting a gain and capturing it. So when Facebook went public I bought some at $18 and told my financial advisor to sell it if it ever hit $36 (which it did of course). So for that part of my portfolio I made a bit more than a 100% annual rate of return for that one stock. Its up to $81 today, at some point it will likely be worthless. But for me, it took some of my money and doubled it in less than a year. Good enough for me. But the Ask HN post is about whether or not equity compensation is "worth it" and the answer in the Bay Area has always been "yes". How much, or how little, extra it is, varies but as long as you wait to exercise and make a profit (yes you pay a bigger tax burden but its always a positive amount of money) it is just "extra" money that you got in addition to your pay. It it worth to work for stock instead of pay? That is a much riskier deal and probably not if you can't afford to pay your own bills independently. And do you have to work at a "startup" to get a big boost out of equity value? Absolutely not.

hkarthik 12y ago
Yeah not sure where the down votes are coming from, but I appreciate your response and I think it's great advice for the folks in this thread. When I was in my early twenties I scraped together about $5K which I was planning to invest in the Google IPO and instead used it to buy my wife her engagement ring. Today that stock might have been worth $50K or more. So while some may see it as lost opportunity, I've enjoyed a wonderful marriage for 10 years as a result of that decision, and I don't regret it one bit.