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

danielgtaylor

Moving to ES6 from CoffeeScript

I fell in love with CoffeeScript a couple of years ago. Javascript has always seemed something of an interesting curiosity to me and I was happy to see the meteoric rise of Node.js, but coming from a background of Python I really preferred a cleaner syntax.

In any fast moving community it is inevitable that things will change, and so today we see a big shift toward ES6, the new version of Javascript. It incorporates a handful of the nicer features from CoffeeScript and is usable today through tools like Babel. Here are some of my thoughts and issues on moving away from CoffeeScript in favor of ES6.

While reading I suggest keeping open a tab to Babel's learning ES6 page. The examples there are great.

Punctuation

Holy punctuation, Batman! Say goodbye to your whitespace and hello to parenthesis, curly braces, and semicolons again. Even with the advanced ES6 syntax you'll find yourself writing a lot more punctuatio

branneman

var fn = function(arg1, arg2) {
    var str = '<p>aap ' + this.noot + ' ' + arg1 + ' ' + arg2 + '</p>';
    document.body.innerHTML += str;
};
var context = {
    'noot': 'noot'
};
var args = ['mies', 'wim'];

// Calls a function with a given 'this' value and arguments provided individually.

sym3tri

- Trailing commas are ok
- No reserved words for property names
- NaN, Infinity, undefined : are all constants
- parseInt() defaults to radix 10
- /regexp/ produces new reg ex object every time
- JSON.parse(), JSON.stringify()
- Function.prototype.bind
- String.prototype.trim
- Array.prototype.every, filter, forEach, indexOf, lastIndexOf, map, reduce, reduceRight, some, 
- Date.now()