That could totally power next generation of green-screen techs. Generative actors may not find favorable response in the audiences; but SFX, decor, extras, environments that react to actors' actions - amazing potential.
There's less here than you think. Video games have already been procedurally generating environment art for quite some time, and film/tv are already leveraging that with giant screens that use Unreal Engine to create the backgrounds.
AI could be helpful here, but it's not clear that it is required or an improvement.
I don't get the autotune argument. It's like saying we shouldn't be using electronic instruments because it's not real or we shouldn't use digital audio instruments because they're not real etc.
It's just a way to get different kind of sound. It won't make you good tracks.
I find this one interesting because Rap has classically been difficult for these models (I think because it's technically difficult to find the right rhythms and flow for a given set of lyrics).
I don't know but it doesn't impress me one bit? like I'm not trying to hate, but it just seems kind of like the model is given the track and then it tries to just follow it by matching words and then spitting them out, like as if it could talk about making a sandwich over some epic track and it'd sound the same?
like, LLMs are fantastic at generating patterns, so words that match and same with images etc.
But there's not much uniqueness? it's "impressive" like a savantic kind of ability to come up with rap, but it doesn't really product something I'd want to listen to..?
I listened to the metal thing and kind of the same thing?
It's very high fidelity, like the quality of the drums and etc it's quite impressive, but the vocals seem off? it's like a poem being read by TTS then transformed into "metal voice"
and kind of just an averaging of "metal music" kind of like stock photos and into a track, very formulaic
not to mention many metal bands etc they do formulaic stuff especially if they have an identifying kind of hit
But to me this is cool tech, but I wouldn't listen to it
I've listened music for a long time but I don't listen to a wide variety today, however for example with pop it can be very complex or very simple, but average or "almost" will really not make a good song, it can seem simple in hindsight but probably blood sweat and tears went into such songs, or creative energy that might never come back as strong.
just my raw thoughts though. it could be me being biased knowing it's AI, but I don't think so. I think my brain has kind of adapted to a point where I can feel if something is AI because it always seems super "average"/mid?
I'd love to see a blind study comparing a wide spectrum of these AI tracks to lesser known real artists (so the participants don't just recognize the songs) to see whether people can tell or if knowledge of the source biases them. I'm genuinely curious as to the results.
I don't think people would think anything strange of a lot of these tracks if they just randomly heard them on the radio.
When you listen to music that has been AutoTuned, you don't know if the singer can actually... sing. If you put them in a room and asked them to sing a song without artificial aid, would you actually enjoy their performance or not? You don't know!
This marked a divergence from thousands of years of vocal performances where singing ability and enjoyment of the music were one and the same.
AutoTune was the first slop, and the general population seems to like it.
The arguments against auto-tune are typically different, since it's obvious to anyone that autotune can't make you sound like a soprano if you're nowhere near - so skill is still required.
The problem with autotune is more that it removes a lot of nuance from singers' voices, it's like listening to MIDI instead of listening to a real piano. This is, however, something that can be improved. Synthesizers can produce wonderful musical effects, and there's lots of highly virtuoso music on synthesizers (including voice distortions, pretty similar technically to autotune) for those that are into it. Progrock, for example, was all about using new technology in complex and extremely interesting ways. Maybe more interestingly for your particular objection, you can look at early electronic music, say Vangelis or Isao Tomita or Kraftwerk. For at least parts of their songs, they could have just programmed their synthesizers ahead of time and played concerts without even being on stage - but that doesn't take away from the fact the music itself.
Ultimately, if the music sounds good and elicits some feelings and thoughts, it's good music. Whether the musicians can reproduce it live or it's done 90% in a studio doesn't really matter here. Of course, it does mean it may not be worth going to a live show from some particular performer, and it also means that the performer is not necessarily the most relevant artist - the person programming the "auto"tune should at least be considered part of the band.
That's like saying movies are not good cause they're not live action-only performances
For me the biggest thing is actually the production, there's many people involved usually and sometimes real magic gets made, and that magic might not even contain any vocals at first
like what is acceptable music? only raw vocals & acoustic instruments?
At least in terms of realism, the image generation field is at the realism line now. Single frame generation with Wan 2.1 / 2.2 (and others) for example, will get you realism.
props to OP for the screenshots and payloads—that’s how you do it. If any IDE wants trust, they know the recipe - make telemetry optin by default and provide a real kill switch.
Engineers: always negotiate for higher base salaries. In the vast majority of cases—especially during acquihires—your equity will be worth little or nothing. Founders and VCs still get paid; employees rarely do.
Don't just accept promises. Ask for the 409A valuation, liquidation preferences, and pay bands. If a company won’t provide transparency, that’s your signal.
Equity is a lottery ticket. Salary is money in the bank.
my equity from 2years pre-acquisition: ~$2800. Then the CEO gave out bonuses when everyone threatened to quit. Then after his 3 month vacation to Italy, he came back driving his new Ferrari.
My equity from 4 years ( employee ~60, grew to over 500 ): worthless. No one is able to exercise any options. They also readjusted when the valuation came below the total raised, making the value of my vested shares ~$13k ( down from ~$200,000 ) . They 'made us whole' by giving more shares with a new 4 year vesting schedule.
Startups have found ways to fuck everyone but the investors with equity. It's confederate dollars; funny money. Maybe some people get great deals, I don't know. From my limited experience at very successful startups, the only people who made real money were those able to parley huge bonuses or base salaries.
The fun part comes when you put in 20 years doing this, and your dream is to buy a nice house, and you finally get your seven-figure payout, and.... it's not enough to buy a house. Because now a house is 3 million dollars.
I'm in Santa Barbara, CA. Good friend of mine just bought a shithole 3-2 1300sqft for $2.2m. $3M doesn't go very far considering 30 years ago it was retirement status almost anywhere.
I don’t get it, at this point you move to Baja or Portugal (for similar climate) and live like a king without ever having to work again (unless you want to). Or a cheaper east coast state if you wanna stay in the US on the coast and have access to to all the same fast food and Walmarts.
How does medical care factor in to your plans? Do those places have equivalent access to care if you stay in or around the main cities?
Even something like living in the countryside domestically would worry me (that is, longer times between calling for help and it arriving, then time to be transported to a medical centre or hospital, and then probably getting transported to the city anyway for access to advanced medical care).
I'm one of those people who took "the money and [ran]"
I'm a digital nomad and have been traveling full time for 7 years now. It's great, it's a good balance of work/life balance but one thing you slowly start to notice is when you leave your country, no matter if you learn the language or how much integrate yourself into that country, you will always be an outsider to the majority in that country.
As an american you will always be a Yankee, Farang or Gringo and will carry the weight of the US collective.
As a neurodiverse offspring of a biracial marriage, I’m starting to feel more and more like an outsider in my home state. Though I’d likely feel it much more if I left now, to your point.
I meant and left out a key word; "most recent". Whoops!
I'm used to seeing yearly or every-other-year streetview updates for locations I look at regularly.
That said, might be mixing up my broader impression with the interval of satellite photo updates in the google earth history.
(but my bay area neighborhood does indeed have streetview history updating every year or so; obviously this is probably on the high end given proximity to tech companies...)
that's not a glamour shot, that's just a sunny day. the dirty little secret of the southern california coast is it is cloudy more than half the time. west la, downright depressing. they call it "the marine layer", i call it cloudy as fuck.
My first sentence is saying "I'm not saying the prices are reasonable."
How does my second sentence say the prices are reasonable? My second sentence is saying chasebank's friend did something that doesn't make sense. It's not saying the housing market in Santa Barbara is reasonable.
Are you intentionally ignoring you said "nice" for what most would consider to be a source of ridicule (4BR SFH in 2k sqft). BTW, you haven't made an argument about real estate differences. The smaller home might be a better deal.
And you're using a turn of phrase that is the opposite of your apparent intent.
>most would consider to be a source of ridicule (4BR SFH in 2k sqft)
I don't think most people would consider it a source of ridicule. (BTW, you omitted 279sqft.) In all the places I see discussing it online, I see tons of people saying 2279 sqft is a normal or even large size for 4BR, and only 1 person saying it's small[1-6].
The average bedroom size in the US is 132 sqft. The average master bedroom size is 224 sqft[7]. Even if we go with 224, with 4 of those, that's 896 sqft used by bedrooms, and 2279-896 = 1383sqft for non-bedroom stuff. I don't see why that's so bad.
>BTW, you haven't made an argument about real estate differences. The smaller home might be a better deal.
chasebank described it has a "shithole". So I assumed the real estate was bad. If chasebank was describing a house on a super valuable piece of land, chasebank should have mentioned that. It would be an important piece of information that would completely undermine chasebank's point. It would be misleading for chasebank to leave out that information, so I assumed chasebank didn't do that. Anyway, the real estate of the one I linked to seemed fine to me.
Either you're acting in bad faith or have a language issue.
For the latter, isn't it odd how you cherrypick and dismiss?
1. Spuriously apply national averages (including a UK forum!!! LOL) to a way above average zip code
2. And conveniently dismiss another HNer's conclusion because they...didn't provide a fact needed for an argument that YOU are trying to make and could research yourself? This is unreal.
>"Yeah, even though I didn't ask, the defendent didn't tell me they were innocent or not, so I will dismiss further review and assume they're guilty."
I'm not cherrypicking. Those are all the top results that Google gave me. I didn't omit any.
You said "what most would consider to be a source of ridicule (4BR SFH in 2k sqft)". You didn't say that it would only be a source of ridicule in certain zip codes.
Whose conclusion am I dismissing? chasebank's? I think chasebank's conclusion is that housing is too expensive. I agree with chasebank there. I'm not dismissing that.
Going full pedant, the more pertinent issue with the house you posted upthread is that it's 8 miles from downtown and outside Santa Barbara city limits. No one in Santa Barbara would consider it a "Santa Barbara" house. Despite the zip code allowing use of "Santa Barbara" on the address, it's in "Noleta", the less expensive unincorporated suburban area between Goleta and Santa Barbara.
Shithole is probably overstating it, but $2.2m doesn't get you much in more expensive Santa Barbara neighborhoods. Here's a 3/1 1000sq foot house that sold for $2.2 in June that better represents what the parent comment was referring to:
A 4BR 2k+ sqft house in any of the good neighborhoods in Santa Barbara ( Mesa, San Roque, Riviera, Mission Canyon, Samarkand) would easily be closer to $2.5-3 million.
Your original comment was "You're making his point. 4br in only 2k sqft? For 2M? Please..."
That's not the same point as sblocal123's point.
Regarding the real estate location point, yes, you and caminante made the same point. caminante made the point convincingly and you didn't. There's nothing ironic about me changing my mind when someone makes a point convincingly.
I have to ask, if they have access to get a loan of $2.2m then the friend could likely save for 5-7 years and just retire someplace cheap. Like, spending that much seems wild given the implied access to straight cash.
anything within 45 minutes of your office in palo alto (where you are mandated to show up 5 days a week). this will get you a 1300sqft piece of shit built in 1964 with asbestos and lead paint and lead pipes and a cracked foundation (also some dipshit realtor had them paint all the original wood beams and paneling inside gloss white and replace the original wood and slate floors with grey vinyl) from some baby boomer forklift driver or mailman who paid 40k for it (you will pay 40k per year in property taxes for it), all for the privilege of “only” spending an hour of your life a day commuting so you can sit in your assigned area of your open concept office with noise canceling headphones on zoom meetings for 4 hours a day surrounded by other people on zoom meetings who also just expended a collective 5000 man hours and countless CO2 emissions to be there.
Every now and then I dream about how much more money I'd be making if I lived in the Bay Area, but then I read something like this and realize that earning ~half as much working remotely from a cheaper (at least when I bought) city maybe isn't so bad.
They are greatly exaggerating. One tangible advantage to living somewhere expensive with higher salaries is that anything you can buy online is effectively that much cheaper. An iPhone costs the same in Arkansas as in San Jose, so you'd end up working many more hours to buy one in AR than in CA, on average.
Yes, housing is more expensive. A lot more. Everything else is way cheaper.
Thank you, so many people like to go about cost-of-living and pretending things are equal because of that, but the vast majority of goods people buy are not priced that way, and in truly remote places the cost of goods actually go up. The land or housing might be cheap, but pretty much everything else costs the same, so the lower paying job still hurts.
I would say the vast majority of spending is affected by COL, since it’s all incorporating price of labor. Maybe not the majority of goods but that’s often a smaller part of spending.
I will say though that travel is the main one that’s obviously independent of where you live (at least mostly). So that’s kind of nice.
The trick is to rent cheap and live like a college student in SF/bay area while young, save aggressively, invest intelligently, then move somewhere comfortable but more affordable (CO's front range is lovely) for your 30s/40s.
I'm so so so glad I didn't spend my twenties working and saving.
I've lived a thousand lives, spent most of the time as true quality time with people I love, and I still have a few years left in this decade of my life.
And I'm still further ahead, financially speaking, than >99% of other people my age. (To those asking, I tripled down on life after getting a remote job.)
The one year I spent 9-5 in an office as a traditional SWE was by far the quickest and least eventful year of my life. Also probably the saddest.
I'm very glad I just said "no" and walked away and simply lived. It was absolutely worth the risk. I would never trade these years for the ability to buy a house in the Bay Area suburbs.
I probably will be able to do that anyways, if I want to, even though I don't.
Except you’re a wage slave and your American Nightmare comes with a mortgage, your sizable interest payments are likely funding the retirement income of a boomer too (along with bankers too, they always get a cut)
90K is still 50% above the median income, not to mention the fact that you have twice as much as time available and using just a small amount of that can be used to cut costs significantly in other areas. It is more effectively a $150K income if we add in the median wage from the job you aren't doing.
This. I moved in a developing nation with a GDP smaller than most US states. I have access to excellent modern healthcare and facilities, get more than 5 minutes in front of my doctor, often 1/2 hour+, and my (nearly 60 years old) health insurance is less than 75 usd a month. Covers 90 percent plus, including mental health, limited dental, and optical. The healthcare sector is private / public hybrid, profitable, and growing. Hands down better in every way than the US state I left.
Dominican Republic. The medical tourism industry here is booming as well. The public sector facilities are not as nice, but you can get free care for the vast majority of basic things that a person needs, without worrying about a bill. Still, people that can usually use private clinics because the experience / comfort/convenience is much better.
What they do subsidize here is education. Anyone with the drive and family support to do so can become a doctor, but you have to do a rotation in the public medical facilities to maintain your licence, and all public hospitals are teaching hospitals, so your case will be observed by 10 to 15 students and a bunch of residents if it’s interesting.
The system seems to work well.
I should also clarify that 75 dollars is about a weeks wages here at minimum wage, so roughly equivalent to $400 in the us economy. That figure tracks for most cost of living expenses here, except luxury items which are typically more expensive here than in the USA.
lol no. Private health insurance in Germany is ~800-1000 for a 60 y.o. – public insurance might be cheaper, but you need to qualify for that when you move here by working as an employee when you're that old. Working permission will require you to work full time. So you'll end up working full time and pay ~600-1200 (based on your salary) in contributions.
I never said public healthcare is free for strangers. It’s rarely the case.
Most of the time if you are not a citizen you need to either work or pay taxes. In fact even if you are a citizen, you may not be covered if you live abroad.
It’s relatively easy to be covered as a stranger : in 99% of situations, if you just set up here seriously and not as a tourist, you’ll be covered. I count a 60yo who never contributed to the system or worked here as a tourist.
Yeah, I run a coffee /cacao farm that employs a few locals, but obviously I don’t qualify for the government insurance. My insurance is private/ un subsidized.
Except that through taxes, your coverage is not dependent on your contribution and your contribution depends on your revenue.
Typically you contribute nothing if you have no revenue and you are still as much covered as the next rich guy.
That’s a huge difference. It means that you can see a doctor or have an ambulance transport you to the hospital for an expensive emergency surgery for 0€ whoever you are. And for the expensive drugs you need after that ? That’s still 0€ with no paperwork.
But to be fair, I’m exaggerating. You may have a 1€ franchise when you see the doctor.
1/3 of US medical spending could be avoided by moving to an efficient single payer system.
But, a lost of ‘waste’ is diminishing returns where there’s some benefit to the procedures preformed. It’s easy to say paying 1 million for an extra week is a poor investment, until it’s you making that decision for a loved one.
Paying 1m/week is objectively a waste when you're refusing to pay 100k for a year, though. Healthcare is paid through insurance, so there's real meat to the loved one distinction - you're not actually making that decision for your loved ones in 99.9% of cases even in the US.
You pay for healthcare in -any- system, even a completely communist/socialist system. Healthcare costs resources which much be allocated to a greater or lesser extent.
Problem with the US system is WHOM do you pay. Ultimately, to a degree perhaps greater than almost any other nation - you're paying quite a lot to stock holders, both public and private, stock holders of insurance, stock holders of pharma companies, stock holders of pharmacy companies, stock holders of EMR software (private company, Epic), and I'm sure, many other for-profit companies. Hospitals tend to be the only technically not for profits in the equation, as well as healthcare groups, but even then these groups tend to operate in a for-profit manner in service of ambitions of regional growth
Even in China you’re looking at 6% of income. Of course taxes aren’t evenly distributed, but 90k means enough income to be worth taxing without the political power to offload the tax burden on others.
You’re misunderstanding what the issues with US healthcare are.
I’ve had significant medical issues in the US and received truly excellent care without significant out of pocket costs, the same is true for many of my friends and family. There’s a reason there’s significant medical tourism to the US and from the US. However on population wide measures like life expectancy you’re better off providing basic care for 100% of the population than world class care for 40%.
There’s also major underlying issues like decades of obesity and ignorance around ‘alternative medicine’, vaccines, etc.
That is a tenancy in common 2 bedroom apartment not a house. Shared ownership of a 100+ year old building with "leased" parking 2 blocks away. Not exactly the home ownership dream.
different strokes for different folks. I can't fucking stand hearing every breath of every neighbor in a 100yr old SF house and having to tiptoe at all times so as not to upset the other tenents
Redwood City is 20 mins from Palo Alto and has a lot of houses for $1-1.5M. $3M means you are paying extra for something optional. It’s not the minimum requirement.
Lots of people are paying millions extra just to live up winding roads on a hill, where the commute is longer, and you need a geotechnical engineer to design your patio.
School quality in the Bay Area is a red queen’s race, and a pressure cooker environment is not good for the kids. Apparently the solution is grade-separating Caltrain.
I remember being a young junior engineer, my manager had just bought a nice house in the good part of town (Charleston, SC) for about 350k. We had a good “be smart with your money and this could be you too in 5 years” conversation. I think by the time I was ready to buy that house had jumped to 600k valuation, these days it’s close to $1M in valuation.
Only way to get a nice house for 300k now is to work remote in some podunk town for a big city salary.
Some anecdotal data points from a guy who lived in the Bay Area when poor people could afford Redwood City and just returned from a family event.
1. The neighborhood I grew up in in San Jose has 3, 4, or even 5 cars in front of every house. My working thesis is that despite being small, these are multi-generational homes, probably with the notional homeowners being the ones that were living there back in the mid-80s.
2. My aunt lives in a much nicer part of San Jose in the house that her husband inherited from his parents. Many of the other neighborhood homeowners are in the same situation, although there has been some flipping going on.
3. Three more boomers at the family event are all living in inherited houses, including one couple that has a pair of houses that they each inherited from their respective parents. They're not renting out the surplus, but instead have turned both into animal rescue sites.
All of these folks are grandfathered in to extremely low Prop 13 property taxes.
This a wonderful summary of the unfair dystopia that is the Bay Area real estate market.
I would also add, the forklift driver who bought the house for 40k in 1971, by state law (Proposition 13), is still paying 1971 valuation property taxes and contributing essentially nothing to local school funding, funding which is mostly covered by you according to a "new guy has to hold the bag" type scheme. In a state obsessed with fairness, a most unfair policy.
Should you wish to modify the property, conventional area wisdom is to just do so unpermitted. Boomers don't like construction because it increases supply and they want no supply, only demand, home price go brrrr. Environmentalists don't like construction because the more nature the better. Others don't like construction because they make it their business to set the vibe of the area as static and frozen. These political interests culminate in a construction permitting process that basically autorejects everything, paradoxically increasing public danger because everyone now does everything unpermitted.
Even the famously wealthy Steve Jobs ran afoul of it and couldn't buy his way out. He had a property he wanted to modify but they wouldn't let him touch it at all. So he just let it sit and rot to make a point. Ultimately the government agreed his plan was better than a rotting house.
I can’t help but miss it, even though I desperately needed to get out too.
I miss knowing where the darkest place is for 50 miles in all directions. I never got to bike highway 1 from SF to Big Sur. My boyfriend and I would have an easier time finding jobs there. There’s better roads for car enthusiasts.
There was a lot of depressing tech saturation in the Bay Area, but there’s still good pockets of the pre-software culture around there if you’re willing to live towards the edges and look for the weirdness.
5 plus years on, all that I really miss consistently is some of the food options there. Everything else you can get elsewhere, for cheaper, and in a lot of cases better. And I know I can't go back to my food options there because half the restaurants I used to like are gone and the other half have changed ownership
Are you the kind of person who refuses to go to the east bay or live next to middle class Asian Americans or Latinos? Because there are plenty of nice places for 3m 45 minutes from Palo Alto. Arguably you could get a house on the south side of the city and be 45 minutes from downtown PA by car or Caltrain.
Pitching a 45 minute commute as as something as acceptable for $3 million is insane. It has nothing to do with class. That’s a shit life driving that every day.
I've spent all my working life in jobs with the rule that the commute should not be more than 30 minutes by bike. I'm now 62, and that's one life choice I've never regretted.
Property tax rate in SF caps at 1.38%, which would be ~$40,000/year. How are you spending $60,000/year, every year, on maintenance and insurance? Are you saving up for a new solid gold roof for every decade?
My average has been around $30k/yr but my house is worth well under $3m so I could see it being closer to $60k. I do include some remodeling in that figure, but things wear out and you aren’t going to want to live with a decrepit interior in your $3m house…
Intrest rates for morgages in Switzerland are around 1% and for tax reasons most people only pay off a third of their property. The payments are very managable, as long as you have the downpayment. You can't fully compare this with a similar price in the US where interest rates are much higher and people pay off the full morgage.
of course that's an option. then you can get a house for a measly 2 million! public transport will only take an hour or more from there .. :)
my wife doesn't drive and we wanted to have access to good public schools and good transportation. this is not a given if you go more rural. The postbus goes maybe every hour or so.
the lakeside communities near Zurich are great and all of our friends live in one of them (on the same side of the lake of course). not living here would have severe effects on my wife's and our kids' social lives.
My point was that you could grind for 20 years and get $1 million payout. Or even a multi million dollar payout. And your reward is that you have to keep on grinding for the rest of your life.
At some point, aren't the C Suite and directors failing their fiduciary responsibility? I know they have broad freedoms, but when you're reducing an a minority shareholder's equity by 95%, it's well past "fiduciary responsibility" and looking like fraud.
I am convinced every executive and wanna-be executive is on the 'inside joke' of funneling money out of the company into their pockets.
I am also convinced that investors believe it's the C Suite's responsibility to tear away any equity from employees to leave the largest pot for investors.
Can confirm from my experience. Although not everyone is like this. Sent me into burnout that I didn't wanna be a dick and extract as much "value" from the employees by walking over them and fucking them over when the chance arises. It's always empty promises to string people along. From my experience, these people (the resource extraction dicks) are also some of the must unlikable and unhappy people I've ever met.
Of course. So if you’re the employee, you’re going to sue? If so you’re paying for your lawyer, and the company is paying for theirs. Guess who goes broke first.
Work for good people with a history of moral dealing. A family member just had a life-changing payout because leadership was generous. A friend walked away from a company pre-pivot without equity for what became one of the decade's biggest acquisitions.
This stuff is lottery tickets, but real ones. You need to be smart about who you make your limited bets on.
And agreed, big cautionary note here shows that Windsurf having "founder-friendly" investors does NOT mean employee-friendly ones.
No one will say: we are looking for cheap mediocre talent with no intention to grow, just to process assigned Jira tickets. Even if that is the actual truth in many cases.
I know this is HN but imo it's rarely ever a good deal to work at startups as an employee instead of a cofounder (with actual cofounder equity not just the title i.e. within the same order of magnitude as the largest-shareholding cofounder), over a bigger established company.
The only good reasons to do so are if you want to learn or make contacts so that you can found your own startup later.
In my pensive moments, one of the things about humans that makes me go "god damn" is how little money it takes for insanely talented people to just come and work for you.
The other good reason is that you might enjoy the experience more than you would enjoy the stultifying, oppressive, slow-moving environment of a big corporation. That's why I keep doing it: I'm not expecting to get rich, I'm just trying to live a good life, and it's proven to be much easier for me to do that when I work for a startup.
I value startup equity at ~$0, but if the salary is enough to live comfortably, that's fine.
You need to work with good people. There is no substitute for ethics.
Also you need not go for roles where they offer .3 % and make a big deal about it. Don’t take less than 1% minimum and as soon as two years pass by and you have carried your weight start looking for a new job. If they value you they will bump you up. It they don’t you will bump yourself up by going for a new job. And don’t be afraid to go for competitors if you believe in the value of the space.
Paid more taxes on RSUs than I'm going to get post IPO. Company took investments on insane COVID valuation and then needed more money posts COVID which tanked it.
The basic idea is that you either have stock, preferably founder levels from 10% up (which is itself a lottery ticket), or you hold retiree bingo cards. The retirement home provides the cards for your entertainment, but the real owners of the establishment, the founders and early investors, know the only way you can earn the big prize is at their expense, so they have a vested interest to see you fail - and they are the ones printing the bingo cards and setting the rules.
I worked for an ed-tech startup as employee number 4, joined when it was obscure; not even in the Alexa top 4 million rankings and almost no revenue. The founder was really good though and gave everyone shares instead of options. I got a bit under 0.2% equity in the company. The company grew (slowly and steadily) to $6.5 million USD revenue with about 10% net profit margins but its last valuation (over 10 years later) was like $8 million USD. They charge like $15 USD PER YEAR PER student for their product so very cheap; I feel like they could easily increase the prices given how widely used they are in my country (over 30% of students in my country use the app).
I had the option to sell some equity recently but it would have only been like $16K USD so I held... I had about $9K taken out of my salary to pay for those so it doesn't make sense to sell given the massive growth the app and not that much dilution... The financial gain barely covers the inflation.
It feels like both revenue and profits have been kept artificially low. $6.5 million per year revenue, still growing steadily, with a loyal customer base with 10% profit seems really good... A valuation of $8 million seems ridiculously low... Not even 2x revenue, for a tech platform with good lock-in factor (they sell a lot of licenses to schools)!
It's kind of amazing how bad a deal it is to work for someone else as an employee. Even if the founder is good and generous in many ways and the business side (which you have little control over as a developer) happens to work out pretty well, they can still pull all sorts of levers to make the deal bad. With this one, I'm going to wait it out 20 years if I must. A lot of the game is just timing, you gotta wait it out, sell at the top... Some people see a peak opportunity to cash-in multiple times in their lives, some people never see it! In my case, I haven't seen the top yet.
I never had any opportunity to make serious money ever. Never had an opportunity to pull the trigger and make even $100K. The best I ever got was in crypto, my crypto was worth $100K but I was earning like 100% annual yield and required a 1-month unlock period. So I made more than that by holding it for 3 years anyway...
I think my career story so far is quite interesting. Probably more interesting than 99% of the classic SV startup stories (at least what they say publicly). I've done some things nobody else has done. Made money in truly adverse environments where a lot of people hated my guts. I've seen people behave in strange ways. At times, I felt like I was almost breaking through the membrane of 'the matrix'; almost transcending my social class. But all I got for it was 3 years of passive income. I never had the opportunity to cash out big.
It's tough out there, so tough, it often feels fake/artificial. Often, it feels like you have to be 'chosen' and that's all that matters. Your work doesn't matter, how talented you are doesn't matter, how lucky you get doesn't matter (besides the luck of 'being chosen').
At the end of the day, money is like a river and people upstream from you get to decide whether or not the river will flow in your direction. When you understand that new money is created constantly and, just like the river, the water cycles between the mountain and the sea, you start to understand the value of positioning and 'being selected'. The people upstream will keep telling you that they don't control the flow of money; that the river flows naturally through the lowest valleys... It's your job to put yourself in that low valley... But really, they've built massive dams up there directing the water almost arbitrarily. You may be at the lowest valley but they're redirecting the water elsewhere artificially because it suits them better. Reality is that they can easily alter the path of the river anywhere they want and it has little to do with 'building something people want'. It's about building something the people upstream want... And sometimes they just want to help their existing friends; unfortunate for you if you are not their friend.
It's a catch-22; you need rich friends to get money but you need money to get rich friends. But I suspect it's way easier for a poor person to get rich by befriending a rich person than it is for a poor person to get rich without rich friends. The second approach feels like you're piercing through 'the matrix' because of all the weird almost conspiratorial resistance you might get (tech feels like one big club).
Sometimes you might accumulate some dirt on some rich people and that gives you some leverage over them but it's the kind of leverage where you have to keep coming back to them to get crumbs. I feel like you can never break through that way due to regulatory capture. You can only do limited damage to them and it's always costly to you. They still have the balance of power.
Sorry to break it to you but 10% profit on 6.5M rev is very low and will absolutely not fetch a high multiple, especially considering this is a mature 10 year old business. This is not a high growth business and you may have grown overly rose colored glasses by thinking it could be priced as one.
So much more. What assets/patents do they own? How much money is in the bank? What does their liability sheet look like? How “hot” is their industry right now?
Some time ago I found a good formula to plugin numbers and get a valuation multiple. The questions above were the ones that really moved the multiplier. A major lot of “startups” are in the 1-2x range. The hot ones will peak at 7-12x.
I suppose the industry is not hot right now. EdTech was never really very hot. It was 'luke warm' at best, a decade ago. They own a lot of software, also, they publish their own math textbook (both digital and print). They have licenses with thousands of schools across multiple countries. I don't recall they have any debt.
I feel like they could easily bump up profits by $2 million just by letting go of people... But they could probably double the license cost per student. Although schools don't have much money, they are kind of slow and bureaucratic; set in their ways. It's a small cost for them anyway, once a system is part of the curriculum, they'll probably pay extra to avoid reorganizing the lessons.
As you describe this is largely a cash flow business and the bulk of the value should be extracted via dividends to the benefit of major shareholders.
A tech enabled business needs gross margins north of 70% to be attractive from a leverage standpoint, unless revenue is scaling very rapidly. Without these there’s no attractive exit opportunities.
They have a lot of employees. I think over 50. Probably more than they need and they re-invest a lot in the business. Also, the cost of $15 per user per year is VERY LOW.
50 employees generating 6.5 mil in yearly sales means the business would barely cover payroll and basic expenses in a first world country. In a lower income country, they can be profitable by taking advantage of cheap labor, but that usually does not scale well to international markets in services.
Yes - equity should be an incentive to contribute the the company's success, and partial compensation for the risk of going to a startup. One should value it at precisely $0 in terms of life planning.
This becomes truer and truer the more of an employee and the less agency over the company's choices you have, but generally if you're not a co-founder (founding engineer doesn't count) equity traded off against salary is someone scamming you.
Not if you live in a country where you can end up paying more taxes than the equity is worth! Be a little careful with Options and RSUs depending on where you live, and even more so for certain companies etc
> equity should be an incentive to contribute the the company's success
the much bigger motivation is "keep the company afloat so i can keep drawing my salary", so just boring old non-equity paychecks provide plenty of motivation.
if you're an employee that thinks your contributions are so great that you are single-handedly juicing the stock price or valuation, you're probably wrong but if not... you should probably take those skills and found your own startup.
I've tried to ask dozens of companies that wanted to hire me just for how many shares were outstanding and/or authorized. They almost always refused to share.
You can almost never get any info on equity until it's too late and you realize it's worth nothing.
> I've tried to ask dozens of companies that wanted to hire me just for how many shares were outstanding and/or authorized.
Those questions are certainly worth asking but employees should also keep in mind that even if they do share that information your equity can still later be diluted away to worthlessness.
My 2c is these are almost always a consequence of the company not being a good business. Well, sometimes you get asshole founders/board members too that's not as common as the company just being an absolute money pit. So instead, I'd focus on asking about business fundamentals/strategy - if the company is money printer, everyone is likely going to do well financially
nope, it happens in "good businesses". once real money is on the line, everything is a dog fight. no one talks publicly because of the reputational repurcussions
not ime. you're also much more likely to get sued for this when real money is involved. cases that i know personally (and myself) either did ok and got pay out or everyone went to zero (below or close to strike price) but founders got secondaries (which screws VCs not the employees).
seen many many cases first hand in NYC. Also, as an individual its very hard to sue a company with a huge amount of VC funding. you need a 100k to burn on it to even have a basic chance, and most cases are a legal gray area, most lawyers wont even take the case.
even finding a lawyer with the expertise to handle a case like this is not easy, its a very small world among those types of lawyers
> I've tried to ask dozens of companies that wanted to hire me just for how many shares were outstanding and/or authorized.
"Wanted to hire me" as in they made an offer, or an earlier step? At offer stage, I've never had a company refuse to answer these questions. I don't have "dozens of companies" worth of experience though, maybe one dozen if that.
Every time I hear this I think experiences and expectations are vastly different between SV and the rest of the country. 30ish years of working in New York and I haven't encountered a single company that isn't 100% opaque about their equity to employees until time of exit/IPO. And I keep a large network.
That said, everyone here treats equity of non-public companies as if it's toilet paper. Some of my coworkers got very lucky and very rich when our company went public, but that was also a long time ago now.
I worked at one for five years: Materialize. Based in NYC. Everyone knew how many shares they owned, what percentage of the total equity that represented, and what the rights of the preferred share classes were.
> if the shares are truly worth X dollars they should buy them back from me
I always offer companies pushing equity hard to trade for cash at 10% of the highest number they try to get me to value it at. Nobody has ever taken me up on it, even when they really should have.
There is another variable. Find better companies to work for. If you don't think this is a unicorn, don't work for them. If this is another stablecoin startup leveraging quantum AI then you deserve what you get, cash comp or no.
It doesn’t matter if you think it is a unicorn or not, it is about risk management.
Early stage investors know that even the best startups have a fairly low chance of success, which is why they diversify by investing in a lot of them. The many failures are paid for by the few successes.
As an employee, you are only given stock in the one company you work for. Even if you think it will be a success, it isn’t smart to put all your eggs into that one basket. No investor would do that, and no employee should either.
If you are working at a startup, a lot of your eggs are already in that basket; your ongoing salary is dependent on the company continuing to succeed. If you take less cash for more equity, you are putting even more eggs into that same basket. If it fails, you are going to lose all the equity AND your salary.
You don’t want your investment risk and your salary risk to be that correlated.
There are certain unicorns; I've worked for one. There are maybe unicorns; I've worked for a few.
Then there are non-unicorns. These may even start as maybe unicorns. But as soon as you know it's never going to be a unicorn, you can leave. Or stay, prospects depending. If you know it's never going to be a unicorn before you even join, you can think of it as glorified contracting. Done that too. Maybe lean on compensation rather than options because a whole lot of nothing is, tap-tap-tap, nothing.
This may work for you, but in general isn’t good advice. You shouldn’t be confusing beliefs and risks. Risk should be managed - you should be comparing cash invested into the public market (or treasuries, or bitcoin, whichever you prefer) with equity in the startup, not with a savings account.
Maybe useful for VCs who have a portfolio of companies and need to put stuff in their presentations to LPs.
If you’re an employee you can’t look at this like an investor would. Your risk profile is completely different. The write up is correct in that it’s basically a call option, correctly point out there is no market for it and then ignore the fact that zero liquidity means you can land a 747 between the bid and ask (if you get anyone to buy from you at all).
There are more than enough stories about employees complaining that they didn't get a big enough payout on an acquisition or IPO to know that this isn't true. It all comes down to your risk reward preference.
Sure, if you don't want to take a risk then look for a higher salary, and probably at a more established company because even if you have mostly salary and little equity a startup is still risky (and you're making it even more so by putting cash pressure on the company at that stage).
On the other hand, if you want a chance at a bigger payout, you'll want more equity. And yes, you may well not get that payout.
> There are more than enough stories about employees complaining that they didn't get a big enough payout on an acquisition or IPO to know that this isn't true.
That's exactly why it is true. If every person who held early stage stock walked out of those events happy then no one would recommend they focus on salary.
The problem is that your risk is compounded because your equity risk is correlated with your salary risk - if one fails the other is likely to fail, too.
Even if each risk is a good one to make separately, it isn’t always good to make both risks.
Indeed. Likewise with non-guaranteed bonuses (gotta love the "plus a discretionary bonus!" commentary during offer discussions).
It's always worth offering to take equity as long as they agree in writing to not ever dilute your shares and vest them immediately. However, it's unlikely that any company will agree.
It's best to imagine compensation as exactly one's salary. Then (virtually) all surprises are good.
> It's always worth offering to take equity as long as they agree in writing to not ever dilute your shares and vest them immediately. However, it's unlikely that any company will agree.
I think it makes perfect sense. It's a guaranteed incentive for a potential employee to increase the value of the company and act in its best interest.
Absent those guarantees, it's smoke, nothing, kaput: 1.5% equity or whatever % can become approximately 0% and there's nothing the employee can do about it.
They could structure the agreement in other ways to incentivize the potential employee: if additional shares are issued, pay a dividend to the employee.
the whole point of equity compensation is that it replaces cash, as the startup rarely has sufficient liquidity in cash.
But equity is often used in ways the employee does not understand and get screwed over. It's also why there are accredited investor requirements for VC/startup investments - so that only those who can afford to pay for a lawyer and such can partake in these deals. Unfortunately for an employee, the loophole is that they don't get this regulatory scrutiny, and also don't have or earn enough to hire a lawyer (and oft times not even access to the cap tables - it's just a literal number of shares, without context).
No wonder employees get screwed while investors (of the accredited kind) don't.
> the whole point of equity compensation is that it replaces cash, as the startup rarely has sufficient liquidity in cash.
Understood and it makes sense. Offering equity to a potential employee is a way for the employee to benefit potentially on future growth in the company.
I'm proposing that if there is a future funding round, pay the employee a dividend from part of the proceeds. Or maybe give them more shares or a combination; but put it in writing from the start.
I don't know how this works, but my question is, on a funding round, couldn't the C suite just allocate themselves additional equity in proportion so that their total value remains the same?
They could, but the shares represent value - and that money needs to come from somewhere. Simple, but extreme example: A company is valued at 10 million gobbledoks, and the C-Suite holds 10%, representing 1 Million valuation. Now the company takes 10 Million gobbledoks Investment that end up in cash on the companies bank account. This raises the the valuation to 20 Million.
Under simple dilution rules, the Investor takes 50%, and the existing shareholders are diluted to 50% of their stake - the C-Suite owns 5% of 2 Million, 10 million as before.
If the C-Suite demands that their equity proportion remains at 1%, they’d suddenly own a stake representing 2 million valuation. That difference needs to come from somewhere.
There is actually a sense to the dilution. If I have something I think is worth $10m, and I'm asking someone else to give me another $10m, doesn't it make sense for that person to own 50% of the company? Why would any investor give you $10m wile receiving no ownership of the company? How are you going to give these newer investors ownership, if you don't reduce the ownership of everyone else?
The claim in the tweet was that they got 1% of the value of the diluted shares: e.g., on paper they should own 1% of $100m, but somehow they only got $10k out of it. There does seem to be a culture of this going around now -- the VC version of "Hollywood accounting". In a lot of situations it doesn't make much sense to me -- is it really worth poisoning the well of startup talent for the VCs to get $95m instead of $85m?
> If the value of a company is $10m and the company asks an investor to give $10m in exchange for equity, the investor should own 100%.
That's not investing, that's buying. Buying means the buyer gives $10m to the previous owners, at which point as you say, the previous owner owns 0% and the new owner owns 100%. But the company is in the same position as it was before -- the same amount of cash on hand as it did before.
For investing, you're putting cash into the company's account, which raises the total value of the company.
Value of the company before investment: intangibles + pre-investment cash - debt = $10m
Suppose I own 10% pre-investment; 10% of $10m is $1m of estimated value.
Value of company after the investment: intangibles + pre-investment cash - debt + $10m == $20m
Now I own 5% of $20m, which is still $1m of estimated value. The investor owns 50% of $20m, which is still $10m of estimated value.
In practice of course, there are different classes of shares which end up being paid out differently.
Legally speaking, it’s probably possible. Practically speaking it almost certainly a guarantee that the company will never see outside investment. On every round someone would need to pony up the cash to fill that employees stock. Anti-dilution clauses exist, but they never work like that.
Such a privilege is also likely to be almost worthless - if the company succeeds and the round makes it worth more, you’ll win even with dilution. If the company doesn’t, then other clauses such as liquidation preferences will make your stock worthless, regardless of how much you own.
The difference is that if the company succeeds, an employee afforded this provision is guaranteed to make $X.
Without this provision, it's possible in many ways for the employee to be left with far less than $X, even if the company succeeds. In some ways <<<<<<$X.
Working at a startup pretty much always involves trading off money in the bank for other things. That’s the industry’s whole deal. Which is why I stay in Big Tech with liquid RSUs.
I had some RSUs from a previous company (likely will not be worth anything) and some options at another, but I have no idea how to understand how dilution like this works. My understanding is surface level of that scene in The Social Network.
I feel like I understand _what_ an RSU is and what options are, but are there any good resources for me to learn from?
So you're working at this startup. Lets say it's worth $10 million. To make things simple, in this company, there are 2 people, the fucker, the CEO, the guy that started it all. He holds 90,000 RSUs, each worth $100, so $9 million, and the fuckee, you, who holds 10,000 RSUs, each worth $100, for a cool million.
Here's where the fucker fucks the fuckee, ie you. The company does a round, and then creates, out of thin air, a billion shares (1,000,000,000), and issues them to the new investors. Lets say the company reached unicorn status this round, which is to say a valuation of a billion.
Holy hell a billion! But wait now there's 1,000,100,000 total shares out there, and the valuation of a billion, divided by the new shares, means that each share, of which you only have 10,000 of, is now worth just under one dollar.
That's right, your $1 million just turned into $10,000. Which isn't nothing, I'd love to come across a random $10k I didn't know I had. But that's just, like, one really nice vacation for you and the kids, which you haven't seen enough of because you've been working so hard at this startup, and not, like, a college fund for the kid that's showing aptitude at engineering and that you were hoping was gonna go to MIT.
Dilution is inevitable, there's no avoiding it. The scenario I presented is just to show you an example of how dilution fucks you. If things go well, would you rather have 10% of $1 million or 0.1% of $1 billion?
For more, it depends on how you like your information. ChatGPT's got stuff like ISOs vs NSOs pretty well covered, Investopedia's got a lot of good stuff if you'd rather it that way.
You are misrepresenting how dilution works - and dilution usually is not what fucks you. Dilution is fairly straightforward - someone ponies up money and gets a share of the company. The valuation that gets handed around is usually what’s called “post money” - how much is the company worth after investors have paid in their money. In a simple example, matching your numbers, a company that is worth 10 million, with 10 million shares, each valued at 1 dollar with a 90/10 split finds someone who invests a billion dollars at 1 dollar per share. These shares are created as part of the acquisition. The value of the shares doesn’t change - the company, post money, now is valued at 1 billion 10 million and has 1 billion 10 million shares, each worth 1 dollar. It also happens to have 1 billion in cash at hand. No change in value for anyone here, but dilution happened - the person that owned 10% of the company pre-investment now only owns 0.1% - but the value of each share is still the same, which means they still own the same number of shares, each at the same valuation with the same total value.
The problem tends to be elsewhere - as part of the deal, the investor asked that his share get preferred treatment in the next round - a liquidation preference which grants them the right to first take their investment of the table and then, whatever is left is distributed. The company gets sold for 1 billion. The investor takes the billion that they invested off the table. There’s nothing left to be distributed. Your shares are suddenly worthless - just as the founders.
I would like to understand a bit here about what you are saying as having been involved in a few startups and I do not quite understand what you are getting at. My understanding based on experience (successful exits, small exits and crash and burns) follow.
First a 409A is generally engineered to keep the lowest value possible in order to allow the employees to exercise their options at the lowest value via an 83b election so at an exit they can be taxed at the long term capital gains rate. When someone joins a startup and is issued options the value of the stock is set via the 409A (which has to be renewed every year). The lower the number the more likely an employee can afford to write the check. 100K shares at $0.01 vs at $0.25 is a major factor for anyone to consider. Any startup worth their damn will make sure the facts in any 409A fit a low number for that reason. The reality of an exit where you are acquired will be based on other numbers that optimize for forward earns and value of your team and tech.
The questions you need to ask are:
What is the total authorized shares?
What is the required process to raise that number?
How are we funded?
Does funding include preferred shares?
What is the preference on those shares?
On an exit what is the payment order?
I agree about the salary bands and at my current company we provide them, as well as answering all the questions above upfront to any candidate with an offer.
The reality of windsurf is that the founders are scum and this is going to end up in court for years. Google should be ashamed.
Under any normal circumstance I've ever seen, you should be taking the higher equity/lower salary combination and should focus on equity rather than salary.
The only time it ever makes sense to push for more salary instead is if you literally cannot get a job at a public company (or even a near IPO unicorn). Plenty of startup employees can, so clearly they believe their startup equity is worth something.
Financially speaking, startup equity is actually worth a lot as an employee (https://www.amafinance.org/startup_comp/). Yah, over 50% it's going nowhere but expectation needs to consider how huge the win is even if it is lower probability.
If I'm understanding your logic correctly, I think it's flawed.
It seems like you're saying: if you choose to work for a startup rather than a bigger company, it must be because you think their equity is valuable, so you should prefer to take more of your pay in the form of equity if you can.
But there are plenty of other reasons for choosing to work at a startup.
You might have chosen to work at that particular startup because the work interests you. You might prefer startups to bigger companies because they have less bureaucracy and can do (some) things faster. You might prefer startups to bigger companies because there are fewer layers of management above you and so you have a better view of why you're doing what you're doing.
Even if you're only in it for the money, I don't think your argument is valid, though this is more of a nitpick: it might happen that a startup particularly wants you or at least your skillset and is willing to pay more for it than any bigger company you've found. You might think the startup is likely to fail, but still prefer being paid twice as much. (This is kinda nitpicky because I don't think this situation is super-common, unlike the other ones I mentioned above.)
First, your stock has a much higher than 50% chance of being worth less, even at the best startups. This is why early stage investors invest in so many companies… a vast majority are worth zero, but the few that make it big pay for all those and more.
This is why you would never see an early stage investor invest in only one company. They need volume to be able to survive the high risk/high reward nature of startup investing.
Now, maybe you think you are a better judge of the probability of success for your startup than an investor, so the risk is lower. You would be wrong; if there was a way to reliably predict which startup would hit it big, then investors (who spend all their time trying to predict exactly that, and have a lot more data and history to use in their evaluation than you do as an employee) would have a much higher success rate.
So even if you have a very promising startup, your equity is a huge risk. Your company probably won’t hit it big, and if it does you have to hope you aren’t screwed out of your equity by the millions of tricks they use to screw employee shareholders; dilution, preferred shares, etc.
Even worse, you are taking double risk. Your startup is risking both your equity AND your salary. You want to diversify your risk, so you can use your investment when your salary fails and use your salary when your investment fails. In this case, those both will fail together if your company doesn’t make it.
Look, equity and stock options are great, but you REALLY have to discount its value as an employee because of the way the risk shakes out as an employee.
> Yah, over 50% it's going nowhere but expectation needs to consider how huge the win is even if it is lower probability.
yes that's literally the definition of expectation value...... so
ev = 1 bagillion * 0.0000000000000001 = ~0
hence you should absolutely not be taking higher equity/lower salary ever. hell i wouldn't even take that at a publically traded company if given the option.
The interesting thing going on is, stars align. The kind of person who has to think about this problem should take equity. The kind of person who would choose to take cash isn't going to be hired at the kind of VC backed business that will end up being worth something.
Yes, a company will do very well if it fills itself with naive employees who think that if they work insane hours and sacrifice their life for equity (which they'll never get an exit event for) will do very well.
I've long preferred working for startups over big companies, but my equity has rarely been worth more than a day or two's salary equivalent.
I know a few people who did well working for unicorns, but that isn't most startups, and pretending that any given startup will be one is selling yourself short.
I've been comparing R1 to O1 and O1-pro, mostly in coding, refactoring and understanding of open source code.
I can say that R1 is on par with O1. But not as deep and capable as O1-pro.
R1 is also a lot more useful than Sonnete. I actually haven't used Sonnete in awhile.
R1 is also comparable to the Gemini Flash Thinking 2.0 model, but in coding I feel like R1 gives me code that works without too much tweaking.
I often give entire open-source project's codebase (or big part of code) to all of them and ask the same question - like add a plugin, or fix xyz, etc.
O1-pro is still a clear and expensive winner. But if I were to choose the second best, I would say R1.
At this point, it's a function of how many thinking tokens can a model generate. (when it comes to o1 and r1). o3 is likely going to be superior because they used the training data generated from o1 (amongst other things). o1-pro has a longer "thinking" token length, so it comes out as better. Same goes with o1 and API where you can control the thinking length. I have not seen the implementation for r1 api as such, but if they provide that option, the output could be even better.
