Matt Todd mtodd

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

Amsterdam Recos

If you are looking to get high, download the app "Greenmile" to find coffeeshops and smartshops near you! (only available on Android) Also, Boerejongens Coffeeshop is legit.

Jordaan

To Do:

Anne Frank Museum: tour of her house, always a huge line so book in advance and go on a weekday if you can.

This document has moved!

It's now here, in The Programmer's Compendium. The content is the same as before, but being part of the compendium means that it's actively maintained.

Github : Signing commits using GPG (Ubuntu/Mac) 🔐

Do you have an Github account ? If not create one.
Install required tools
Latest Git Client
gpg tools

# Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install gpa seahorse
# MacOS with https://brew.sh/

Hiring guide

Taken from Medium. I wanted a compact version with all the pieces together, assembled here for my own use. Abridged in some places.

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

	#!/bin/bash

	#
	# Export $GITHUB_TOKEN with your access token
	#

	function get_build_status(){
	branch=$(git branch 2> /dev/null \| sed -e '/^[^]/d' -e 's/ \(.*\)/\1/')
	repo=$(git config --get remote.origin.url \| egrep -Eo '/(\w+)' \| cut -d '/' -f 2)
	status=$(curl -s -u "$GITHUB_TOKEN:x-oauth-basic" https://api.github.com/repos/github/$repo/commits/$branch/status \| jq '.state' \| tr -d '"')

	<excludefname_rule plat="mac" osVers="" ruleIsOptional="t" skipFirstCharThenStartsWith="users/" contains_1="/.git/" contains_2="" doesNotContain="" endsWith="" hasFileExtension="*" />
	<excludefname_rule plat="mac" osVers="" ruleIsOptional="t" skipFirstCharThenStartsWith="users/" contains_1="/node_modules/" contains_2="" doesNotContain="" endsWith="" hasFileExtension="*" />
	<excludefname_rule plat="mac" osVers="" ruleIsOptional="t" skipFirstCharThenStartsWith="users/" contains_1="/_build/" contains_2="" doesNotContain="" endsWith="" hasFileExtension="*" />
	<excludefname_rule plat="mac" osVers="" ruleIsOptional="t" skipFirstCharThenStartsWith="users/" contains_1="/deps/" contains_2="" doesNotContain="" endsWith="" hasFileExtension="*" />

	" Put this in your .vimrc and whenever you `git commit` you'll see the diff of your commit next to your commit message.
	" For the most accurate diffs, use `git config --global commit.verbose true`

	" BufRead seems more appropriate here but for some reason the final `wincmd p` doesn't work if we do that.
	autocmd VimEnter COMMIT_EDITMSG call OpenCommitMessageDiff()
	function OpenCommitMessageDiff()
	" Save the contents of the z register
	let old_z = getreg("z")
	let old_z_type = getregtype("z")

	#!/bin/sh

	set -e

	# clone a bare repository, because even with `--no-checkout`, clone will create a
	# folder for a working directory, and it will ignore the `--git-dir` option.
	# but the restore all the configuration that would be there.
	git clone --bare [email protected]:/ethomson/dotfiles .dotfiles.git
	git --git-dir=.dotfiles.git config core.bare false
	git --git-dir=.dotfiles.git config push.default simple