yossorion

What I Wish I'd Known About Equity Before Joining A Unicorn

Disclaimer: This piece is written anonymously. The names of a few particular companies are mentioned, but as common examples only.

This is a short write-up on things that I wish I'd known and considered before joining a private company (aka startup, aka unicorn in some cases). I'm not trying to make the case that you should never join a private company, but the power imbalance between founder and employee is extreme, and that potential candidates would

sobstel

# `ERROR:  Error installing nokogiri:
# ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
# 
#   current directory: /usr/local/var/rbenv/versions/2.3.1/lib/ruby/gems/2.3.0/gems/nokogiri-1.7.0/ext/nokogiri
# /usr/local/var/rbenv/versions/2.3.1/bin/ruby -r ./siteconf20170103-68488-r71c9j.rb extconf.rb --with-xml=/usr/local/Cellar/libxml2/ --use-system-libraries
# checking if the C compiler accepts ... yes
# checking if the C compiler accepts -Wno-error=unused-command-line-argument-hard-error-in-future... no
# Building nokogiri using system libraries.
# ERROR: cannot discover where libxml2 is located on your system. please make sure `pkg-config` is installed.
# *** extconf.rb failed ***

neilang

'.source.ruby':
  'frozen_string_literal':
    'prefix': 'freeze'
    'body': "# frozen_string_literal: true\n"

bmhatfield

# In order for gpg to find gpg-agent, gpg-agent must be running, and there must be an env
# variable pointing GPG to the gpg-agent socket. This little script, which must be sourced
# in your shell's init script (ie, .bash_profile, .zshrc, whatever), will either start
# gpg-agent or set up the GPG_AGENT_INFO variable if it's already running.

# Add the following to your shell init to set up gpg-agent automatically for every shell
if [ -f ~/.gnupg/.gpg-agent-info ] && [ -n "$(pgrep gpg-agent)" ]; then
    source ~/.gnupg/.gpg-agent-info
    export GPG_AGENT_INFO
else

dideler

# Require this file in spec_helper.rb to show which cassettes are not being used
# after the test suite has run. Then you can decide if you want to delete them.

require 'vcr'
require 'set'
USED_CASSETTES = Set.new

module CassetteReporter
  def insert_cassette(name, options = {})
    USED_CASSETTES << VCR::Cassette.new(name, options).file

nikcub

In August 2007 a hacker found a way to expose the PHP source code on facebook.com. He retrieved two files and then emailed them to me, and I wrote about the issue:

http://techcrunch.com/2007/08/11/facebook-source-code-leaked/

It became a big deal:

http://www.techmeme.com/070812/p1#a070812p1

The two files are index.php (the homepage) and search.php (the search page)