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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

This might be a harsh, unpopular opinion, but if someone is going to accept a job where equity is a significant portion of their compensation, they really need to understand the essentials of equity, how options work, their tax implications, how to read basic financial statements, and so on. This is your livelihood we're talking about. Would you accept a job that paid in Bitcoin without understanding the basics of cryptocurrency? How about one that paid in Beanie Babies? I'm not saying go back to school and get a Finance degree, but people need to get informed about their compensation!

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> Would you accept a job that paid in Bitcoin without understanding the basics of cryptocurrency?

the funny thing is that the vast majority of people don't understand how money comes into being, how banks work, etc. And yet, they still just accept cash and use it.

So may be it isn't irrational to have accepted bitcoins in a job as payment, without understanding it. The reason most people don't accept bitcoin (or crypto in general) is that they feel the value is too volatile and might change too much for them to make good financial plans with it.

As a wide-eyed engineer who absolutely should have the knowledge you're talking about but doesn't. Any good comprehensive resources?

Random googling never gives me confidence I'm getting the right information when it comes to money, nutrition, and health.

The book I’ve seen recommended is “Consider your options” https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1635049.Consider_Your_Op...

Learn the vocabulary. Look up things like 409a valuations, 83b elections, NSO and ISO stock options, the difference between long-term and short-term capital gains, strike price vs exercise price (plus how and when taxes on options are triggered and calculated), marginal tax rate vs effective tax rate. Probably also worthwhile to learn the basics of corporate finance, like annual recurring revenue (ARR), costs of goods sold (COGS), customer acquisition costs (CAC), differences between cashflow and profit, EBITDA (plus what each of those words mean), capital expenditure (capex) vs operational expenditure (opex). If you understand the vocabulary, it's a lot easier to evaluate whether a given source is authoritative or not.

Sign up for Matt Levine's newsletter. He's perhaps starting to be a little overexposed on HN, but he's informative and humorous, and his newsletter is a good way to get a little exposure to finance every day.

It's not not startup-equity specific, but check out Bogleheads for generic investing advice.

What I Wish I'd Known About Equity Before Joining A Unicorn: https://gist.github.com/yossorion/4965df74fd6da6cdc280ec57e8...

TLDR Stock Options: https://equity.ltse.com/calculators/tldr-stock-options

If your livelihood is based on equity in a private company, that’s already a problem.

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