jdmaturen

Who pays when startup employees keep their equity?

JD Maturen, 2016/07/05, San Francisco, CA

As has been much discussed, stock options as used today are not a practical or reliable way of compensating employees of fast growing startups. With an often high strike price, a large tax burden on execution due to AMT, and a 90 day execution window after leaving the company many share options are left unexecuted.

There have been a variety of proposed modifications to how equity is distributed to address these issues for individual employees. However, there hasn't been much discussion of how these modifications will change overall ownership dynamics of startups. In this post we'll dive into the situation as it stands today where there is very near 100% equity loss when employees leave companies pre-exit and then we'll look at what would happen if there were instead a 0% loss rate.

What we'll see is that employees gain nearly 3-fold, while both founders and investors – particularly early investors – get dilute

adamwiggins

Make it real

Ideas are cheap. Make a prototype, sketch a CLI session, draw a wireframe. Discuss around concrete examples, not hand-waving abstractions. Don't say you did something, provide a URL that proves it.

Ship it

Nothing is real until it's being used by a real user. This doesn't mean you make a prototype in the morning and blog about it in the evening. It means you find one person you believe your product will help and try to get them to use it.

Do it with style

eric

Update

You can now find this packaged up nicely in a rubygem as rollout-zk.

---

Zookeeper storage adapter for rollout

I've implemented a zookeeper-based storage adapter for [rollout][] that does not require any network roundtrips to check if a feature is active for a user.

technoweenie

// outdated
// see https://github.com/technoweenie/camo.go

mislav

;(function($) {
  document.addEventListener('click', function(event) {
    if (event.metaKey || event.altKey) {
      var link = $(event.target).closest('a[href]')
      if (link.size()) event.stopPropagation()
    }
  }, true)
})(jQuery)

eric

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

#
# Annotate your "bundle outdated" with GitHub compare URLs
#

require 'open-uri'
require 'json'

def rubygems_gem_info(gem_name)

vmg

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <math.h>
#include <float.h>
                                    int  main
                                    (int argc
         ,char *ac         []){int i, count =                  argc - 1;
         double  *         dvalues=malloc(01-                  01+count*
sizeof(double)+1);         double mi=DBL_MAX,ran=.0,ma         =DBL_MIN,mo;for(i=         00; argc>1
&&i<count;i=i+8-7)         {double val = atof(ac[i+1])         ;if(23&&val<mi)mi=         val;if(val

lusis

    case $i in
        (0) set -- ;;
        (1) set -- "$args0" ;;
        (2) set -- "$args0" "$args1" ;;
        (3) set -- "$args0" "$args1" "$args2" ;;
        (4) set -- "$args0" "$args1" "$args2" "$args3" ;;
        (5) set -- "$args0" "$args1" "$args2" "$args3" "$args4" ;;
        (6) set -- "$args0" "$args1" "$args2" "$args3" "$args4" "$args5" ;;
        (7) set -- "$args0" "$args1" "$args2" "$args3" "$args4" "$args5" "$args6" ;;
        (8) set -- "$args0" "$args1" "$args2" "$args3" "$args4" "$args5" "$args6" "$args7" ;;

sealabcore

/* 
  Play entrance music
*/

/* defining a new responder is probably the best way to insulate your hacks from Campfire and Propane */
  Campfire.EntranceMusician = Class.create({
      
      initialize: function(chat) {
        this.chat = chat;
        

fujin

[pod_services] [Fri, 22 Jul 2011 05:25:55 +0000] INFO: service[pod-services] not queuing delayed action create on ruby_block[pod-services] (delayed), as it's already been queued
: stdout
[pod_services] [Fri, 22 Jul 2011 05:25:55 +0000] INFO: service[pod-services] sending create action to ruby_block[pod-services] (delayed)
: stdout
[pod_services] [Fri, 22 Jul 2011 05:25:55 +0000] INFO: Processing ruby_block[pod-services] action create (pod-services::default line 55)
: stdout
[pod_services] Loaded suite /usr/local/bin/chef-solo
Started: stdout
[pod_services] 
[pod_services] #<Class:0x00000001539f98>::ChefMiniTestRunner::DHCPTest#test_request: : stdout