Bracken Mosbacker bracken

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

Hi Zach :D

Modals are funny beasts, usually they are a design cop-out, but that's okay, designers have to make trade-offs too, give 'em a break.

First things first, I'm not sure there is such thing as a "simple" modal that is production ready. Certainly there have been times in my career I tossed out other people's "overly complex solutions" because I simply didn't understand the scope of the problem, and I have always loved it when people who have a branch of experience that I don't take the time

General key themes:

Hiring is really hard. You’re not just hiring a “Rails Engineer” or a “Python Programmer” you’re hiring someone who can help you change the world. Tell them why! Talk about the hard problems you’re solving. 2/3 of these talks give ideas and insight into hiring from sourcing to actual interview processes.
Rewriting systems is hard. People think they are going to replace their broken down horse and buggie with a bullet train and this often ends up in disaster. Successful rewrites require an incremental approach that takes months/years and often runs way over schedule. 2/3 of these talks go over how to handle rewrites not only from a high level technical perspective but a cultural/management perspective as well.

Two Developers, Many Lines of Code, and A Campaign that Made History

Harper Reed (CTO of Obama for America, now CEO of Modest) and Dylan Richard (Director of Eng of Obama for America, now CTO of Modest)

http://vimeo.com/104052532

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.

	// ==UserScript==
	// @name Zendesk Customizer to add functionality for instructure
	// @namespace http://support.instructure.com
	// @description enhance the functionality of zendesk for use for instructure peeps.
	// @include http://support.instructure.com/*
	// ==/UserScript==

	(function(){
	// Add jQuery
	(function(){

	#!/usr/bin/env ruby
	# Usage: gemspec [-s] GEMNAME
	#
	# Prints a basic gemspec for GEMNAME based on your git-config info.
	# If -s is passed, saves it as a GEMNAME.gemspec in the current
	# directory. Otherwise prints to standard output.
	#
	# Once you check this gemspec into your project, releasing a new gem
	# is dead simple:
	#