As someone who is not in the field but reads about it from time to time I see the same theme over and over: The formatting, consistency, and manual cleanup of data. The theme of data scientists who are "data janitors" that spend most of their time "cleaning data" is a consistent one.
UPDATED: Would like to know your thoughts! I was wondering, if companies can pay that much for consulting with AWS , why is consulting in general still considered something not to do , for instance VC's hardly fund any company that is doing consulting.
As someone who recently got a decent chunk of money after a liquidity event as an early employee of a mildly successful startup I find this to be bad, borderline dangerous advice. It makes me very sad that this is such a common view on this topic.
Evaluate a startup equity offer as an investor would. Ask about the cap table (you don't need to know names, just numbers), ask about the company's financials. Ask about growth plans. Don't work there if they don't tell you these things.
Do some market analysis. Try to understand the motivations of different agents in the game (founders, VCs, potential acquirers). Watch some YC videos — they have great resources on youtube for both founders and angel investors.
Understand how stock options work, there're whole guides on this stuff nowadays. Exercise early if you have capital and conviction about the future of the company.
This stuff is complicated, might seem daunting, and will take a lot of time to really understand / master. But do this early in your career and it will pay off many times over.
> Evaluate a startup equity offer as an investor would
this is not possible to do. Nth+ employee is almost nothing like an investor: no leverage, almost never access to the same amount of information and very last in line to cash out due to liquidation preferences. Basically, you have roughly 1/100th of leverage and information a typical company investor does so it's almost always a leap of faith, maybe based on some proxy observations. Sharing the cap table with an employee is something I've never heard of, unless maybe you're employee number 1 or so.
The game is rigged against you. You do have a lot less information. My point is more like, don't just give up and instead try to understand and learn the game, try to improve your chances. I see so many people (friends, acquaintances, coworkers) making poor decisions with these things simply because they don't learn about them, and that makes me sad. So many smart people who are able to build all these complex systems, but can't be bothered to learn about how stock options work.
Employment game is rigged from the beginning against employees. Recruiters do this stuff every day, they're way better negotiators than you. They talk to each other, they know all the tricks. They know what other companies pay in similar circumstances. Finding a good job is tough and can be pretty depressing honestly, but the worst thing you can do is give up.
Learn the system, find weaknesses. Find those gems where you do get an edge. Maybe try to get a job at a small startup where you will be that #1-10 employee. Maybe the founders will be just as inexperienced as you and so you'll be able to get all this information and get a better equity deal.
RE Cap table, you're right that no company will straight up tell you exact names and numbers. And that's fine. But you absolutely have to get at least a few of them:
* how many shares are outstanding
* what's the current fair market value for the shares
If they don't tell you these two things, you can't evaluate the equity offer. If they are more open, try to get some info about founding rounds & liquidation preferences. The smaller the company is the more willing they should be to share this information with you.
This. The only guaranteed cash is cash in hand. A lot of companies offer it in lieu of salary which is an insane proposition to take.
Last place I wasn’t confident of their market position so I negotiated a better salary instead of stock. On acquisition I would have made around 6 months salary which I’d earned 3x more than already with a better salary negotiation and invested it elsewhere.
YMMV but “fuck you money” stock and options payments are not the norm on startups.
It's a tool to reduce cash expense on compensation. Many startups offer at or below market compensation, and attempt to make up the difference by granting stock options and RSUs. More often than not, it's a sucker's deal: the person who's taking real risk, including the possibility of losing all income and health coverage, perhaps jeopardizing mortgages and such in the process, is not getting a commensurate reward for that risk.
It's never a good idea to take a pay cut (salary-wise) to work at a startup. Moneywise, it makes even less sense to leave public company stock (esp. FAANG whose stock is growing at a healthy clip with much lower risk) and salary compensation to go work at an early stage startup (e.g., pre series-D, let's say).
> More often than not, it's a sucker's deal: the person who's taking real risk, including the possibility of losing all income and health coverage, perhaps jeopardizing mortgages and such in the process, is not getting a commensurate reward for that risk.
It's a sucker's deal because point-zero-whatever percent of some nondescript startup is not likely to compensate for the lower wages and benefits relative to larger companies. And there certainly are jobs where you can trade lower pay for higher stability (i.e. govt). But no one in the US tech industry (big or small) ever claimed to be about lifetime employment in recent times (well maybe some crazy outlier firm somewhere does). Your long-term financial stability is your responsibility, not theirs. The tech giants will have their layoffs sooner or later too.
And if you're going to cite FAANG salaries and recent stock performance, then to be fair you need to compare it (also utilizing hindsight) to the fastest-growing startups with the best stock performance.
> And if you're going to cite FAANG salaries and recent stock performance, then to be fair you need to compare it (also utilizing hindsight) to the fastest-growing startups with the best stock performance.
I'm not sure this is the case, since if you made an employment decision, say, 1 year ago (or whatever), FAANG was a known quantity back then, too.
You wouldn't know this year's FAANG performance, but you could arrive at reasonable-ish expectations based on previous years' performance, whereas a startup that was just getting off the ground at the time would be a total unknown even if it managed to make everybody rich in this past year.
As is common knowledge, though, the startups that make everyone rich (let's ignore the moderately successful ones for the moment because we're talking about taking reduced pay in the hope of future stock performance) are the unicorns, so statistically you should not be expecting that yours will (particularly if you're an employee who doesn't have the business-level decision-making power to significantly impact that probability).
You mean at the beginning of a pandemic and a series of antitrust investigations, with stocks widely considered to be at extremes relative to fundamentals in tech history?
Looking at some price curve and trusting it because of a trend in hindsight is just bad logic and dangerous investing. Those curves change quickly and unexpectedly, crashing right at the time when the most people become bullish believers due to being wrong so often otherwise. You can only trust fundamental reasons for investing, and those are way out of whack currently. I see the same story again every ten years and we are overdue.
This isn't really conflicting with my observation that they're a known quantity, though. You could still look and say "Gee, this company has been behaving like a monopoly for years and their stock is overvalued - they're probably going to face setbacks soon, so I probably shouldn't take their stock options at face value".
My point isn't that the curves will stay steady or increase, but that you have historical data on them to draw an informed conclusion, bullish or bearish, which just isn't the case with startups.
I agree with you that it is absolutely fair to compare FAANG salaries and stock performance to that of fast-growing startups because they are the primary avenues for smart people trying to make money in this industry. But the latter clearly are in the losing position insofar as the risk (and therefore, commensurate reward) is concerned.
In terms of risk, they are completely different animals. FAANG are included in the S&P 500 index, which automatically triggers investments from many funds that have rules about this sort of thing. Many high-growth startups do not have that going for them. Further, they often fail to sustain their meteoric growth for sustained, long periods, adding further imponderables to the mix. Having been at many such companies myself, and having friends in FAANG for roughly the same period, I find that on the whole, they are doing much better money-wise, and surprisingly, in terms of career development.
In terms of salary compensation, again, growing small-mid size companies again fall short in comparison to the FAANGs. The reason is that FAANGs have good structures set for performance management, career paths, and compensation increases. The former, in contrast, are almost always lacking in having good structure in these areas. So for the average engineer who's mulling a choice between the two, the risk/reward ratio tilts towards the FAANGs.
Note that I'm mostly talking about money, and to a much smaller extent, about average career growth here. There are still plenty of other good reasons to work at small-mid size companies, but in terms of money, it is difficult to argue that going to the FAANGs leaves you worse off than the alternative.
> And if you're going to cite FAANG salaries and recent stock performance, then to be fair you need to compare it (also utilizing hindsight) to the fastest-growing startups with the best stock performance.
Most count their FAANG stock with 0 growth. You still get 180k for junior, 250k for mid level and 350k for senior per year.
Better value for money in compensation packages. Prospective employees value the stock compared to cash more than the company does, ergo the company gives it to them.
Theoretically the idea is that if the company becomes a unicorn and has a huge IPO and becomes a new tech giant then employees will do really well financially. OP's story isn't that. If investors got "some" money back then it was a failure of business. Probably an acquihire. So neither investors or employees got the big success payout they were hoping for because it wasn't a big success. Investors got some money back and employees got paid a salary for however many years to work on what is probably a useless product.
In virtually every instance, the point of employee stock is for you to get played by founders to work longer hours at sub-standard compensation. In most cases the founders are cool with this because they’re sociopaths.
Generally I think these scenarios happen because the founders get backed into a corner and forced to exit with a sub-optimal deal:
Founders don't _want_ to screw over employees, but at the end of the day, they have a duty to their investors too and if the company is failing, the best thing can do is recoup something out of it.
Outcomes for employees are based on decisions well before the exit.
I suspect some founders just never really get around to the up-front tasks that are necessary to take care of employees. It takes significant effort to put together an employee option plan. You also have to go to the mat for employee equity in funding negotiations, for example to top up early employees. It's easy to slight these in favor of tasks that contribute more directly to company success.
The point is to share success and incentivize for success. Secondly, public companies can give compensation packages with high base salary and equity grants. These packages for engineers could be in the range $200k-500k and the equity piece is pretty much liquid. Startups cannot pay $500k but they can pay reasonable salary (50-90th percentile of the market) and equity options with a huge upside multiplier.
Startups are a venture. Join them if you want to join a venture. Don't join a startup for if you want stability or predictable outcomes.
In the past 12 months, there has been probably 20 tech ipos or more. These IPOs have been in the range of $5B to $100B. Each of these outcomes might net early and late employees anything from few hundreds of thousands to several millions or tens of millions.
The very first employees (first 1-5 employees) might get ~1-2% of the company for their 4 year vesting. That diluted over multiple rounds over the years might still mean the ownership is at least 0.1-0.2% or more. Company hitting $100B market cap after listing means the employee’s position is now worth $100-200M. That’s amount of money you can never earn with salaries. You can only earn it by starting a company or joining a startup early on with a good equity package. Both cases it's rare to achieve that but it does happen. Probably each IPO you see has a few of those.
The reality is that VC funded businesses need to be massively successful with maybe 10-1000x the returns to be considered a success and return something to the employees.
It’s called an option, so it’s an option for employees to buy the shares with ~1/5 of the preferred share price where it was when you joined the company. Investors pay higher price for the preferred shares and one of the things they get is the liquidation preference, so they get their money back first. Good rounds and VCs do 1x liquidation preference. Bad rounds or bad VCs companies might force company to n-x liquidation preference. As a founder, you don't lose with the liquidation preferences like everyone else, so it's not in your or in the company interest to do them.
This is also where the valuation comes in. A hot startup might raise a lot of money and have a high valuation early on but won’t be able to execute and scale to the level to meet the expected valuation. Now everything below and level of that valuation is considered a failure. Then if the company cannot keep executing, raise more money or just generally lose steam, they might have to sell the company to get something. Honorable founders and management would try to help to employees to keep their jobs or even see if there is way to give any of the proceeds.
Exercising options is always risky since the startup outcomes are risky. You shouldn’t exercise with money can't afford to lose.
Savy companies and savy employees join companies with extended exercises where employees can keep their options up to 10 years without exercising. This avoids the downside risk for employee but unfortunately doesn’t help with taxes. Exercising early can start the clock for long term capital gains and some cases QSBS (tax free treatment up to $10M).
Summary: options are definitely worth it if you join the right company. When considering joining the company, think how an investor would. Would you believe in team and business and invest? Check their investors, are they reputable? Join companies with extended exercise windows, exercise early if you have the means and belief the company will succeed.
Company hitting $100B market cap after listing after listing means the employee’s position is now worth $100-200M. [...] Probably each IPO you see has a few of those.
The biggest tech company IPO of 2020 was Snowflake, and that had a market cap of $75bn at peak. Most IPOs and direct listings ended up with market caps much lower. I strongly suspect there were no early hires walking away with 9 figure payouts in any of them.
Airbnb closed at $99b on the first day. Doordash is now $70b. Snowflake is now $80B.
It doesn’t really matter if it’s $100b or $50b. You would still make at least $50m as one of the first employees.
I know multiple _late_ stage employees that walked out with several millions. It’s not hard to believe early employees would walk with 10x or 100x that.
If can believe that angel investing can be worth it, I’m not sure why people don’t people don’t believe startup equity is not worth it. It’s the same thing, but instead of buying preferred share, you buy common shares with discounted price.
Jason Calacanis $25k angel investment in Uber was worth $100m after the ipo. As employee your equity grant would be likely 10x more than that.
Also btw, companies would love not to give out equity. You could sell it to investors at higher price and dilute the founders less as you don’t need option pools.
It doesn’t really matter if it’s $100b or $50b. You would still make at least $50m as one of the first employees.
Unfortunately, that hasn't been true for years. VC firms stopped leaving that money on the table and have been taking those gains in the form of liquidation preferences or stock grants before IPOs that dilute employee shares.
Jason Calacanis $25k angel investment in Uber was worth $100m after the ipo. As employee your equity grant would be likely 10x more than that.
This is clearly not true; there was no "Uber Mafia" after its IPO. If anything, Uber employees were complaining about how little they saw of the IPO, on HN and reddit. And that was before Uber's stock price dropped like a sinking rock after its IPO.
>> That's normal and is why I count startup stock and options as $0.
This absolutely need to be conveyed to every present and future employee of startup.
Unless you're founder or investor taking a risk - startup shares worth nothing.
I think startup hiring managers using worthless options as a negotiating tactic should be prosecuted for securities fraud.
Misleading employees is no less crime as misleading investors.
If you don't like privacy then you don't need curtains in your house.
Ask them to unlock their phone and hand it to you. Most people will balk.
One thing to think about is that some people don't mind losing their privacy to the government or a corporation but they do care about losing it to real humans that know them. As an example, if a husband is cheating on his wife he doesn't care if the NSA or Big Tech knows about it because they (most likely) won't do anything negative with that information. But he would want to keep that information from people he knows because they may use it against him and will definitely treat him differently by having that knowledge.
Not uncommon at all to have no curtains. Portion of those that do, might use them for other purposes too (glare, light etc).
People will balk at giving a random friend their device but probably will be perfectly okay handing it over unsecured to a repair shop.
People will be unwilling to show many body parts to a friend but likely perfectly fine showing them to a doctor.
That I do not want to show something to you specifically, doesn't mean I'm hiding something from you. If you ask me to give you my browsing history I may or may not. Depends on the reason. If it gets leaked to everybody I will be rather unfazed. But if you call me to tell me you're carefully examining the leak at this very moment, I will still feel weird about it.
Another example. The nearby grocery store knows what food I'm getting every other day. Would I like this information broadcast to friends and family in real time? No, would feel awkward. Will I go crazy if the list for the last 2 years gets leaked in an instant? Not at all.
Another alternative to curtains are blinds which also help to block your reflection at night. However they’re not good at absorbing sound so you are probably right to stick with curtains.
Another example is, if you don’t care about privacy then why post letters in envelopes.
This argument falls over when considering that people do actually send holiday postcards not in an envelope. Why are people so relaxed about their holiday data?
When it comes to government privacy, a good argument can be that you might trust the current people in government, but does the system offer enough protections to protect against future regimes? If you're talking to someone who didnt like Trump, there are probably examples of actions he took that they would consider to be abuses (and people on the other side would probably think the same about some Democeat leaders).
In essence it's a UI library with a HTML-like syntax. You write your application in Angular, React, or Vue and you don't have to mess with recreating UI elements. Here is a list of the pre-made Ionic components that you can glue together to create your app [1]. Here is a site where you can play with the components and see them in action. [2] You can also purchase "starter apps" that have boilerplate such as Facebook login, geolocation, and more built in [3]. You can also use Capacitor JS to access native platform features (camera, clipboard, localstorage) without knowing any native code. [4].
I too am new to this and to me it makes much more sense to use Ionic rather than learn the deep and ever-shifting platform specific-code.
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Voice_Acting/Enunciation_Exe...