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Comment by sethbannon | Hacker News Reader

This is great news for the NYC startup ecosystem, which had been lacking in the billion dollar exits that create the next generation of entrepreneur-investors.

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How many of Tumblr's employees have been with the company more than a year or two? It sounds like they were only 20 employees at the end of 2010 [1] so I'm curious how many people actually got significant enough vesting to get the cash to call themselves entrepreneur-investors.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/19/tumblr-funding-office-hires...

The Double Click acquisition spawned a ton of investment and led to companies like Gilt and 10gen. It will be interesting to see what Marco Arment does with a cool $100 million or so. He seems to have a golden touch. Tumblr, Instapaper, and The Magazine makes him 3 for 3.

Considering Marco left Tumblr a year before [1] they raised their last $85M round at $800M valuation [2] do you you think it realistic/possible that he had 1/8th the company after that deal?

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/21/marco-arment-instapaper/

[2] http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/26/tumblr-raises-85-million-ro...

I wonder how much shares he has. Two days ago he tweeted that:

https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/335483318311194624

> @ericf @jsnell 1) I was technically an employee, not a founder. 2) My shares were from the first funding round, before any further dilution.

How much shares would a (number 2?) employee typically get? And does it mean his shares were diluted or not?

My rule of thumb is co-founders have 2/3, employees have 1/3, and investors cause a 75% dilution per round. Thus since their are 4 rounds, .75^4 * 2/3 => 21% between the founders.

However, in this case it appears that Marco wasn't a co-founder, but rather a first employee with an equity grant. If it were for 5%, it is probably worth ~1-2% now, and so I'd reckon he will see $15M. That is a lot of money, but not enough to change the startup landscape.

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