Anthony Powles yogin

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

1:1 questions

Always end with an assignment

What can I hold you accountable for next time we talk?

What can I be accountable to you for the next time we talk?

Short term

How is [project] going? What could we do to make it better?

Is there anything blocking you from getting your work done?

Are there any projects you’d really like to work on if you were given the opportunity?

These are the Kickstarter Engineering and Data role definitions for both teams.

Technical	Data	People
Junior Software Engineer
Software Engineer	Data Analyst
Senior Software Engineer	Data Scientist	Engineering Manager
Staff Engineer	VP of Data	Engineering Director
Principal Engineer		CTO

Keybase proof

I hereby claim:

I am yogin on github.
I am yogin (https://keybase.io/yogin) on keybase.
I have a public key ASBl6kYpShP6pnDIBCqnHgSCW0BRxZwaSbyEA_NDFBBZ9go

To claim this, I am signing this object:

	# installing Homebrew, and some common packages

	$ ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)"
	$ brew update
	$ brew tap homebrew/dupes
	$ brew install apple-gcc42 wget curl git ack ctags-exuberant

	# installing rvm and ruby

	$ curl -L get.rvm.io \| bash -s stable

	#!/bin/bash
	#
	# Get all IPs from an autoscale group and update set the local ip as
	# equal weight A entries (round robin dns). Takes autoscale group as
	# parameter.
	#
	# Amit Bakshi
	# 10/21/2014
	#

	// Copied from: https://ethfiddle.com/09YbyJRfiI

	// CryptoKitties Source code
	// Copied from: https://etherscan.io/address/0x06012c8cf97bead5deae237070f9587f8e7a266d#code

	pragma solidity ^0.4.11;

	/**
	* @title Ownable
	* @dev The Ownable contract has an owner address, and provides basic authorization control

	pager sed 's/,/ /g'

	SELECT GROUP_CONCAT(CONCAT('DROP DATABASE ',SCHEMA_NAME,';')) FROM information_schema.schemata WHERE schema_name NOT IN ('mysql', 'information_schema');

	nopager

	vagrant@kratos:~$ chmod +x manage_monitor.sh
	vagrant@kratos:~$ sudo cp manage_monitor.sh /etc/init.d/manage_monitor
	vagrant@kratos:~$ sudo update-rc.d manage_monitor defaults