AlwaysBCoding

you are issued equity in the form of stock options. Stock options give you the opportunity to buy stock in the company at a specific "strike price" enshrined as the fair market value of the company when you sign your offer letter.

you aren't actually vesting stock month to month you are vesting your stock options. when you "exercise" your stock options you pay the company the strike price * number of options you want to exercise in order to purchase the actual stock in the company.

If the company has grown in value since you joined then you would have a taxable event upon exercising your stock options because you are buying the stock at the strike price, but the fair market value of the stock is significantly higher, so that is a taxable capital gain that you have to deal with.

Any sane company will give you a 10-year exercise window after leaving the company to actually pull the trigger and "exercise" your stock options so that you don't incur a tax liability but some companies only give you three months. Which means not only do you have to front the cash to "exercise" the options, but you also have to pay the tax liability on the capital gain of stock for that year.

If you're asking how you can possibly be expected to pay the tax on a million dollar+ capital gain, without ever even having access to cash or a guarantee you even will have access to cash in the future, then welcome to the scam that is being an employee at a Silicon Valley startup and the fucked up logic of the US tax code.

This isn't true. Company executives don't owe a fiduciary duty to employees or holders of stock options in a company, they only owe a fiduciary duty to concrete shareholders. There are a lot of founders of less than high moral character who want to keep it this way.

I sent a Section 220 demand letter to the founders of this company to get transparency on the money that was taken during the secondary stock sale and they're currently fighting me on it because I wasn't a shareholder at the time the secondary sale took place, I only held options in the company at the time.

This anecdote is illustrating a real world situation in which it is being used as a way for founders to try to screw their employees, not because their hands are tied by some arcane tax law.

what happens if the founders subsequently run the company into the ground, having personally enriched themselves off their employees work, who they then destroyed the upside for?

should the employees have a legal claim against the money that was taken in the secondary transaction?

It's also wrong because it's not the founders work in isolation that is providing the liquidity opportunity in the first place. The entire purpose of a joint-stock company is to align incentives for all shareholders to benefit from the value creation of the company. Founder secondaries are a work-around that hack money into the pockets of a couple people off the back of other's labor instead of collectively enriching the group performing the labor.

you don't need the same voting rights, for example

I'm not sure if you even need the same class of stock as it is needing some assurance of the same liquidity rights as founders. If the company charter ensured that any secondary liquidity event would have equal participation between shareholders (including employee stock options) it would be a lot healthier and prevent this class of fraud.

It's such a garbage situation right now for employees, because even if you find product-market fit, you do the work and your company is successful you can still get dumped on by your founders taking secondaries and subsequently checking out of the company.

The company is Phantom, and the VCs are Paradigm.

The situation I recently went through reads like a horror story:

> was the founding engineer at a startup, essentially do co-founder work for 18 months getting the company off the ground.

> company is a breakout success, raises a large growth round.

> founders each take a couple of million dollars off the table in secondaries, no option for employee liquidity.

> founders start thinking about early employees as "problems" because they have too much equity and could easily hire multiple FAANG engineers for the equity comp they're paying the early team. push all early employees out of the company.

> horrible ego-based decision making such as this kills the company culture and runs the company into the ground. company is a mess, stock is now worth significantly less.

---

> early employees have to pay money to exercise their stock options which are worth millions on paper. early employees have to front money to pay taxes on the capital gains on the stock.

> founders have pocketed millions, off the backs of other people's work, while the employees who built the company all owe huge tax bills and have no path whatsoever to ever seeing liquidity with the floundering company.

> all of this is because the employees did their jobs too well, the company grew too fast, and the founders egos got completely out of control.

To be blunt, situations like this should be illegal. joint-stock companies aren't slush funds for three people to personally enrich themselves off the labor and capital investment of others, they're supposed to be entities where all shareholders participate in the upside of the value creation together. Until there's some sort of legal framework for pursuing class-action lawsuits against founders who defraud their employees like this I don't think this situation will ever get better. There are already laws against self-dealing transactions by company executives, I don't see what is different in cases of extreme founder liquidity off the backs of other people's work.

Another fun fact re: Dustin Moskovitz

Dustin was an early investor in Alameda Research and was also one of the biggest donors to Mind the Gap -- Sam's mom's Super PAC. When SBF was about to go under Dustin was his first call to try to raise money (came out in the FTX trial).

I second everyone saying the paywall is the actual problem. I used to write on Medium a lot because it was a simple way to blog and share essays with a minimalist UI. Now it just feels like a clown product because you have a paywall between users and reading. I would never subject my writing to an ugly paywall and wouldn't want the experience my readers have with my content to be ugly and broken like that.

because the hiring process is on autopilot and the leadership of the company has already exited / checked out so they're not incentivized to care or be in the weeds enough to preemptively put a stop to it.

pretty sure i pumped and dumped some coins on bitrex back in the day.

You can export the chaindata at any time and run geth on another OS, AWS is just a convenience because it's easy to spin up and easy to devops. It costs $300/month to run, I'm using it in production and it works great so far. I'm still glad to take your $1,000 if you'd like a full tutorial.

AWS offers a hosted Ethereum node service now. It's pretty simple to set up. I would be glad to walk you through it for $1,000.

A good article by Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, on "credible neutrality" as a guiding principle for the protocol: https://nakamoto.com/credible-neutrality/

Twitter has long lost credible neutrality as a platform which is why it's ultimately going to die.

1. Money Laundering: If you made money from a pump and dump or something otherwise nefarious that you want to convert back to USD and explain away, a good way is to mint digital art and sell it to yourself. Then when you report it to the IRS you made $100,000 from selling digital artwork to an anonymous buyer instead of from insider trading a low market cap coin. This is not so different from how art works in meatspace (see Mark Rothko).

2. Charity: It's hard to really grok this if you don't live in the crypto world but people make insane amounts of money from Ethereum. I know multiple people who are under 30 and have each made upwards of $500,000,000 from buying ETH in the presale / insider trading in bull markets. Generally someone who bought into the ETH presale is a mega crypto bull and keeps a large percentage of their net worth in crypto. It's trivial for them to support artists by buying their artwork for a minuscule fraction of the money they've made. What sounds like "buying a .jpg for thousands of dollars" to someone not in this world, is more like the crypto equivalent of tipping a live streamer a bit on twitch.

It's only an anecdote but I used to buy Adderall on Libertas, which was a Monero-only drug market, seemed to work pretty well and solved a real world problem for me.

this sounds cool, do you have a video of it somewhere?

I always got the sense that Mao's genocides are more visceral in the West because of the large Chinese immigrant population that lives in the US.

Something I find interesting is that they're adding built-in entropy to this update. You will now be able to set the probability that a MIDI note will fire in a melody. Or set a range of probabilities for the velocity value of a MIDI note. I'm sure that you will be able to map the range probabilities to the ADSR of synths etc... I'm curious if that is more of a novelty or will actually be a valuable tool for exploring ideas.

I think there's a fairly common story that goes like: two people, founders, spend a few months hacking on an idea together, without getting paid, build a functional MVP, run a beta, get positive feedback from beta users, maybe start making revenue, enough to have confidence in product-market-founder fit, want to start taking salaries so they can work on the nascent product full-time, reach a level of codebase complexity where adding another developer would add a lot of value, decide the right path forward is to raise a seed round to launch and reach a revenue milestone in 12-18 months, raise enough money to pay the founders salaries + make a few hires...

And now you're in the situation where you have put in enough upfront work to have confidence in product-market fit but still choose to raise money and build out an initial team ahead of real revenue / traction.

that's a great reading list, thank you for doing this.

I used to make MIDI maps of songs in Ableton and then record myself singing along to it. The I would use the "convert audio melody to MIDI" command and get a MIDI map of my audio recording and overlay it with what the song should be. Gives you good visual feedback to correct things that you might not have noticed ... Oh wow I'm coming up flat on that 5 every time. etc...

Also, second everyone who is saying get a voice coach. Very valuable in surprising ways.

Possibly unrelated but I would pay $ for a one-click earnings call app. Type in a stock ticker, get the most recent earnings call in an audio player in one second.

I've hung out a bunch at Twitter's offices (in both SF and NYC). It's pretty eye-opening and a good lens into why Twitter the company is so fucked up.

The vibe that comes off is more of a social hangout club than a serious tech company. You meet your friend for lunch and there's professional chefs cooking gourmet meals, you hang out in the social area while the celebrity of the day comes into the office and everyone takes pictures with them. There's breakout rooms where people are filming marketing videos. The people that are hanging out talking to celebrities all day are making $200,000+ somehow. Anyone with right of center political views is casually censored from the platform with no recourse, because it's a "cool social hangout platform" not a serious technology product with mature guidelines of what acceptable speech is and formalized appeals processes. There won't be any productivity loss from everyone going remote because nobody is doing real work anyway.

would you hire a sculptor by asking them a random trivia question about the birthday of an Italian architect? FANG would.

ask them what they've built in the past and start digging in from there.

^ Trump Derangement Syndrome.

The model of precision and correctness being opposing forces that increase in strength the more you hone in on one is useful for me and something that I had never put into words before.

what even is cheating on an algorithm problem? looking up an answer online? asking someone in your social network to help you work through the problem? because that's what you actually do in the real world. as long as you can explain / defend your solution what does cheating even mean.