chrdlu

8 ms·

31.
by chrdlu 9y ago
https://medium.com/dydxderivatives/introducing-dydx-2d0f0f32... Note: I'm not affiliated with that project, but I did see them present yesterday at Token Summit and it looked very interesting!
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by chrdlu 9y ago
In many ways nostromo95 is correct, however that $1B is probably sitting at the top of the liquidation preference stack. The rest of the money would probably be buying earlier preferred stock or common shares which would be riskier especial
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by chrdlu 10y ago
We take a percentage of the future proceeds (which gives us upside in the startup). You may be surprised, a lot of companies are taking >10 years to IPO including Mulesoft. Feel free to send me an email at chris@esofund.com and we can ch
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by chrdlu 10y ago
Each deal is custom tailored to the optionee. As you can imagine, some people have higher strike prices than others and as a result, the economics of the deal would change. We typically aim to take a minority position because we want our co
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by chrdlu 10y ago
As elastic_church mentioned below, the firm I work for (The Employee Stock Option Fund: https://employeestockoptions.com ) could help fund the exercise and help cover potential taxes. We aim to give employees upside in the startu
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by chrdlu 10y ago
It looks like the acquisition price was about ~$14 or so. From the S1, it looks like the following: 2014 employees had strike prices of $1.70-$2.43 2015 employees had strike prices of $4.48-$7.02 2016 employees had strike prices of $8.10-$1
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by chrdlu 10y ago
I found them after Parse shut down. I tested them out with a small meeting for coffee app and found it to work very well. After the recent add of custom logic via AWS Lambda, I am using them to build a larger travel app.
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by chrdlu 10y ago
You are correct! Our pricing depends on a bunch of factors including how much money it takes to exercise the shares and what we think the company can exit at. We aim to take less than half the proceeds. Sometimes if the exercise cost is hig
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by chrdlu 10y ago
Each of our deal is custom tailored to the specific situation. In the situation above, we would help provide the 300k upfront and then we would negotiate terms. We aim to take less than half of the ultimate proceeds, but that ultimately dep
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by chrdlu 10y ago
The good news is that there are a couple new firms that aim to address this exact issue. The firm I work for is called the Employee Stock Option Fund (ESOFund) and we aim to help employees exercise and cover the taxes associated with the ex
41.
High Growth: A Double Edged Sword for Employees?(employeestockoptions.com)
2 points by chrdlu 10y ago|0 comments
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by chrdlu 10y ago
Early exercise is great for the majority of situations. The 100k limit for ISO options can be a potential downside. If there is a spread between the strike price and the FMV, only the first 100k worth of shares will be considered ISOs and t
43.
by chrdlu 10y ago
As smeyer pointed out, for most startups, employees are not allowed to sell/transfer the shares. Startups like to keep the cap table locked down and have no incentive to allow their employees sell. Sometimes, the company will allow a n
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by chrdlu 10y ago
There will be a new 409a value following the round. The 409a value is the price of common shares that an independent valuation firm determines. An increasing 409a means that future stock options will have a higher strike price. For existing
45.
by chrdlu 10y ago
There doesn't seem to be any elegant solutions for equity compensation yet. The main issues seem to arise once an employee leaves or gets fired. While the employee did put in many years of work, its not too fair to have the options dis
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by chrdlu 10y ago
Not only that, but he's been killing it. Ashton Kutcher's been able to get himself access to some of the next big tech companies include Uber and Airbnb. According to this article[1], he 8.5x a 30 million dollar fund in 6 years (I
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by chrdlu 10y ago
Awesome product! Technology continues to make it easier for people to program and prototype. Keep up the good work!
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by chrdlu 10y ago
It's not that they can't be profitable. It's more along the lines that they are re-investing all of their profits to grow the business. The market Twilio is in has plenty of room to grow and Twilio has to aggressively capture
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by chrdlu 11y ago
What are your thoughts on this sort of technology? http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=H... Summary: Cytotropic Heterogeneous Molecular Lipids (CHML) are used to treat patients with multiple
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by chrdlu 11y ago
The difference is when you exercise NSOs, you also have to pay withholding tax (ordinary income tax rate) to the company who then pays it to the IRS. For ISOs, you don't have to pay tax at exercise, but you may be subject to Alternativ
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by chrdlu 11y ago
Not yet, but there are startups working on them! http://www.gizmag.com/flying-car-zee-aero/29890/
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by chrdlu 11y ago
It all depends on the start up. Some start ups have a lot of authorized shares and some have less. This is all reflected in the capitalization table ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization_table ) of the company.
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by chrdlu 11y ago
Love the new features. I was hoping to see the ability to programmatically create File Requests. Looks like it might still be a while before it gets implemented.
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by chrdlu 11y ago
Actually, Palantir just raised a Series K... https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/palantir-technologie...
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by chrdlu 11y ago
http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html As Paul Graham says, "A startup is a company designed to grow fast." and it seems like Palantir is still growing incredibly fast.
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by chrdlu 11y ago
http://www.amazon.com/Maxims-Morals-Metaphors-Venture-Capita... If you're looking for a really short book with a good explanation of the entire process. The cover is a bit funny as the book is a bit old, but the inform
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by chrdlu 11y ago
Yup, just gotta scroll down a bit more!
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by chrdlu 12y ago
That's way too common of a story :( Until startups change the 90 day exercise window, you can go to something like esofund.com to help offload some of the risk.
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by chrdlu 12y ago
From my understanding, one of the reasons the IRS is so behind is because the initial code base was written in Assembly. Only a handful of people understand how it works...and they're all getting old (they have also been motivated not
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by chrdlu 12y ago
Fair point, Alex Krizhevsky did train the entire neural network on 2 GPUs in his bedroom. I stand corrected

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