danielweber

13 ms·

91.
by danielweber 10y ago
I agree with you. The dilution events happen because something unexpected happens, not because "we had to hire people." If people are getting diluted from shares being issued to employees like you, you have already entered a death
92.
by danielweber 10y ago
Assume you are correct and it is not a contract. That doesn't mean the employee gets stock options. The contract granted the stock options. With no contract, there's nothing.
93.
by danielweber 10y ago
There's this mug's game where you are treated as belligerent for wanting access to the essential data to value your shares, and stupid if you value your shares at zero.
94.
by danielweber 10y ago
I've seen this scenario multiple times: 1. Company needs to raise money 2. Company issues new shares 3. Board realizes "oh shit, this is a lot of dilution" 4. Board decides "okay, who is important enough to keep around&q
95.
by danielweber 10y ago
Or the company could do the very hard and legally annoying work of convincing candidates that the equity won't be destroyed at a moment's notice.
96.
by danielweber 10y ago
> In most Unicorns that's definitely not the case. It's only true because the market allows them to do that. The reason those unicorns lowball on salary is because they can . If workers keep saying "yes, I'll take tu
97.
by danielweber 10y ago
I was at a start-up -- that I co-founded, so I take some of the blame here in not realizing what another co-founder was baking into the cake, but at least I can warn others now -- where the company interpreted "right of first refusal&q
98.
by danielweber 10y ago
On paper you have a lot of money and the company reasonably might go public a couple years after you leave. If you aren't at the company, it will be extremely ordinary for some funding event to dilute you to nothing. And you will hav
99.
by danielweber 10y ago
Meanwhile, the FTC sued D-Link over insecure defaults in their cameras. We need good and consistent rules about this, and "well I was giving it away for free" isn't as clear a boundary as people will think it is.
100.
by danielweber 10y ago
> They are all in there from the beginning, whether they are known or not Some things only exist because of the environment. If I went back in time to 2001 and tried to get people to take CSRF attacks seriously, they would lose me when I
101.
by danielweber 10y ago
Chrome isn't a credit card vendor. I can save your credit card number for you too, if you want.
102.
by danielweber 10y ago
And Jeremiah Grossman was talking about it a decade ago. It's amazing these problems persist.
103.
by danielweber 10y ago
Shares need to come from someplace. Other people selling shares to the VC doesn't put any money into the company. The company needs to sell shares, and create shares if it doesn't have any left. It's often abused, and easy to
104.
by danielweber 10y ago
"You only lose to preference in case of a lowered valuation" is true only for 1x preferences. For 2x preferences, employees can lose out even if the valuation goes up, just by not as much as needed.
105.
by danielweber 10y ago
How long has it been since someone linked 'patio11's guide to getting more money? If more than a week, too long, so: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ We should all read t
106.
by danielweber 10y ago
> (out of everybody's share) Except that every dilution I've witnessed has come with re-upping the people who really Matter. Current employees we want to keep, and people sitting the board room. Not everyone takes an equal hit
107.
by danielweber 10y ago
Hell, many years ago, before some of our HN readers were born, I co-founded a start-up that had trouble recruiting people because we only created 200,000 shares at founding, and other companies were giving away millions of options. How co
108.
by danielweber 10y ago
Employees usually have no visibility into preference, even when explicitly asking about it.
109.
by danielweber 10y ago
Dilution is way too easy to abuse, but there's a lot more to it than just "fucking over employees."
110.
by danielweber 10y ago
The start-ups could do the very hard work to make sure that employees can trust the stock options. I've seen all sorts of games. One of the most common, which is surely a violation of fiduciary duty but no one cares to do anything abou
111.
by danielweber 10y ago
> Why are bankers so highly paid? Because a job candidate being told at an interview "we are looking for people who are motivated by things other than money" would walk out, and the banks know it.
112.
by danielweber 10y ago
Of the various promises society has made to various people, when did "you always get to live in the city you were born in" end up on the list? There are trade-offs everywhere. The reason these crazy cycles continue is because pe
113.
by danielweber 10y ago
Living in the nice part of big cities is a positional good. It's going to get more expensive as society gets more expensive, because you are trying to buy your way on top of a ladder. If you take a look at the top 40 or so entries here
114.
by danielweber 10y ago
Telemarketing isn't "make work." They are providing value to their employer. You are hitting on one of my concerns, though: make labor cheap, and people could be hired to basically annoy other people. I want to keep it simple
115.
by danielweber 10y ago
Anyone who has spent any time in a poor community knows that there is still a lot of work that needs to be done. We will only hit real make-work jobs when we can no longer answer the question "how would I solve this problem, if only I
116.
by danielweber 10y ago
Make labor cheaper. Not for the worker, but for the employer. 1. Wage subsidy. Tax people like me more to increase the EITC. At the extreme this is make-work jobs, but there is a lot of ground to cover between here and there. 2. Make employ
117.
by danielweber 10y ago
A career lasts 40 years. Once the technology is good enough to deploy in one instance, how long until it is dominant? Say it takes 10 years to replace most of the fleet. That still means someone driving a truck at age 25 will be facing an e
118.
by danielweber 10y ago
People know when you're making fun of them and tune out.
119.
by danielweber 10y ago
If we had solid safety nets, this wouldn't happen It depends on their form. People aren't on drugs because they don't have enough money. People are on drugs because their lives lack meaning, and simply getting a government
120.
by danielweber 10y ago
I noticed it during his first scene, but either my suspension of disbelief won out of they got better tech as the movie progressed, because it looked totally natural later. Of course, I was expecting to notice it. If I hadn't known abo

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