akchin

This resonates a lot with how I felt while building our company. My kids were born during the early days of our startup and it was pretty much what he described- work and being a dad. Thankfully the startup was pretty successful and I made a good amount of money that’s allowed me the luxury of not having to work when the older one was 10. I am really enjoying not working and being a full time dad :-)

This sucks. I was at Google many years back and I remember her to be an awesome product leader. In fact even though I was another org, she was helpful and really helped me and our team.

I can’t use them as well.

Just saw this news here. He taught me at Cornell when I was a CS undergrad and I remember that class fondly. I still remember one of his office hours which was a day or two before thanksgiving. No one showed up except me and I remember thinking to myself - I am here by myself with a Turing award winner. Unreal!! He was a fantastic professor and person. RIP, professor Hartmanis

As a 90s Indian cricket fan, this was exactly my thought :-)

Delhi is DC - capital of the country, lots of politicians and bureaucrats. Also spread out quite a bit and with lots of impressive historical and government buildings.

Mumbai is LA and NYC sort of combined - entertainment capital (Bollywood) and financial capital (main stock exchange, banks, Dalal street (equivalent of Wall Street). Also like NYC, cramped with lots of skyscrapers.

This is a tough one, but I would look for signals that you would look for even with non-Indians. e.g. is someone being excluded from team building activities, OR after work get togethers, OR are someone's ideas being dismissed without any particular reason.

Now, with specifics to Indians, - if you hear someone mention they are Brahmin for no real reason, or in relationship to being really good at something, make a mental note that they may be at high risk of discriminating others - if you hear folks pejoratively putting down someone because of where they are from or how they grew up - a small village

Kudos to your parents. I was fortunate that even while growing up in India, my parents never told me my caste and never filled it out in any school forms. If they teachers pushed for it, my parents would tell me to write Hindu, which of course is a religion. This worked because I grew up in big cities, were it wasn't discussed much.

He is talking about Monday not today, Tuesday. RH didn’t work on Monday either.

This is not fully accurate.

You have to pay AMT on the difference between your strike price and the current 409a price of common. It doesn't have much to do with where preferred is valued, other than the fact that a high preferred value, means that the updated 409a common might be higher.

So let us say, your strike price is $0.50 and you are fully vested after 4 years. The company recently does a round where preferred is at $3.00 per share and the new 409a is $1.25/share. When you leave this is what will happen - You need to pay the company $0.50 * number of options you have - You have to pay AMT on (1.25-0.5) * number of shares

With last year's tax law, one good thing is that AMT rules changed, so AMT might not apply. You should, of course, talk to your accountant/tax professional for the proper advice :-)

Wow, that is cool to hear. We used to get the British coverage, so grew up with Murray Walker.

Is the commentator Murray Walker by any chance :-)

It shouldn't matter a lot since I am 99% sure that they were issuing RSUs at that time and not options. So the strike price based on 3-years ago valuation is not relevant. Also, I am sure the number of RSUs you got at Uber should have been more than the RSUs at FAANG, to compensate for some of the risks. Now, if an individual Uber employee came out ahead, vs. having joined a FAANG really depends on the offers they had.

In general this is good advice. However I would advice against depending too much on VCs. They don’t really get it right a lot of the time. At the end of the day it is the caliber of the team, the sales/customer acquisition strategy and the competitive dynamics of the market and the position of the company within this market. So the first part about judging the team is valid. The answers below about asking questions about sales/acquisition is very good. Depending on the stage of the company, you should also ask about profitability or if there is a clear path to profitability.

Also don’t shy away from asking challenging questions...such as competitors etc. and be wary of a CEO who is dismissive of challenges. You should get a well thought out answer.

Ha - I think you might be thinking about 2009-2011 or so. That was the Google+ effort (under VicG) and thinking that games (like it did with Facebook) would be a key driver of growth. I think this was also around the time of the bad $180M+ acquisition of Slide to get Max Levchin. Lots of folks used this "social games" and the Google+ track to launch stuff and get promoted quickly and then after it shuts down, find another place within the org where they can now hang out with the nice salary that comes with the promotions they got. :-)

The comment was about how WhatsApp was good with the model they had before facebook’s acquisition and how now the model to make money is because of mbas. That is what I am commenting on. It is as if MBAs are the reason Facebook is trying to monetize WhatsApp in a different way.

I don’t understand the MBA hate here. The WhatsApp founders don’t have MBAs and sold their company to Facebook for 19 billion. They wanted to be that rich. Nothing to do with MBAs.

Also let us be clear. Engineers are no saints either. Case in point Anthony Levandowski of Otto. Orchestrating one of the shadiest acquisitions to make a quick buck.

Folks have pointed out below that the issue of growth is not necessarily an mba or maximizing shareholder thing. In some competitive environments if you don’t do it, you will die. That said one can always do what DHH did with 37 signals...that was a specific choice. Nothing to do with having an mba or not.

One has to look at things with nuance, not just be black and white.

It is kinda cool to think that Scott himself was a really young undergraduate at Cornell. I believe he was 16 when he was a freshman at Cornell and we would hear whispers of the child prodigy in the CS department. He then graduated in 3 years and has gone on to do great things. He is a really nice person and I met him a few times since I was a CS undergrad at Cornell at the same time - He actually helped us run the programming contest we ran at Cornell. I presume if he participated, he would probably have won it hands down :-)

I found the article very insightful. I spent the weekend reviewing Dropbox's S1 and had the same issue - they are not being completely honest about their cohort retention numbers. They have created some new metrics/charts that show increasing value but doesn't show the real metrics - what is specific cohort churn etc. This article mentions that very clearly.

Don't get me wrong - Box's initial S1 also had some very abstract cohort metrics. They took some very early cohorts and extrapolated from that. I think they are more open now as there is more stability in those metrics and they are moving in the right direction.

This might be unpopular, but California is a great example of a place where taxes are high, but it is not spent well. I remember looking at this a few years back, and although the state claims that 2/3 of state tax dollars goes towards education, a lot of it is supporting pensions and benefits of previous generation employees and teachers. While this is admirable, it essentially takes money away from today's generation for unsustainable promises made by unions and political leaders in the 80s and 90s. CA already has one of the highest marginal tax rates in the US of 9.5%, so it is understandable the woman does not want to pay more.

For schooling, Prop 13 is an even bigger issue. Even though property taxes are high for new buyers, schools are underfunded. Parents essentially are paying higher taxes in the form of fundraising to support science and other enrichment classes, which cannot be supported by the state. There were somewhat noble ideas behind Prop 13, but essentially what we have in California, is that newer residents of Californa bear a disproportionate amount of the burden.