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

brntbeer

• https://leanpub.com/automation-and-monitoring-with-hubot
• https://zachholman.com/posts/deploying-software
• https://blog.newrelic.com/2015/08/18/chatops/
• https://www.atlassian.com/continuous-delivery
• https://reddit.com/r/chatops
• http://www.wired.com/2015/10/the-most-important-startups-hardest-worker-isnt-a-person/
• http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/07/rise-of-the-bots-x-ai-raises-23m-more-for-amy-a-bot-that-arranges-appointments/
• http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/10/facebook-chatbot-analytics/
• https://dev.botframework.com/
• http://www.adultswim.com/videos/rick-and-morty/something-ricked-this-way-comes/

mxcl

#!/bin/bash
#
# Faster toolchain build: skips as much as possible.
#
# To use this toolchain from the command line:"
#     export TOOLCHAINS=$(whoami)
#
# we build to the same prefix every time (instead of building
# to a versioned prefix) because every time the prefix changes
# *everything* rebuilds.

alloy

# Do *not* load any libs here that are *not* part of Ruby’s standard-lib. Ever.

desc "Install all dependencies"
task :bootstrap do
  if system('which bundle')
    sh "bundle install"
    sh "git submodule update --init"
    # etc
  else
    $stderr.puts "\033[0;31m[!] Please install the bundler gem manually: $ [sudo] gem install bundler\e[0m"

pcreux

# ruby convert-to-ipad.rb video1.avi video2.avi video3.avi
#
# Prereq: brew install ffmpeg

ARGV.each do |input_file|
  output_file = input_file.gsub('.avi', '.ipad.mp4')
  cmd = "ffmpeg -i #{input_file} -acodec aac -ac 2 -strict experimental -ab 160k -s 1024x768 -vcodec libx264 -preset slow -profile:v baseline -level 30 -maxrate 10000000 -bufsize 10000000 -b 1200k -f mp4 -threads 0 #{output_file}"
  puts cmd
  system cmd
end

JamesDullaghan

Deploy Rails app to digitalocean with nginx, unicorn, capistrano & postgres

Create droplet of your liking (ubuntu 12.10 x32)

ssh to root in terminal with your server ip

ssh [email protected]

Add ssh fingerprint and enter password provided in email

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

chitchcock

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't real

sstephenson

# Clone rbenv into ~/.rbenv
git clone [email protected]:sstephenson/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv

# Add rbenv to your PATH
# NOTE: rbenv is *NOT* compatible with rvm, so you'll need to 
# remove rvm from your profile if it's present. (This is because
# rvm overrides the `gem` command.)
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$HOME/.rbenv/shims:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile
exec $SHELL