dpiers

(2017)

That's not how ISOs work. You are taxed on the bargain element (discount to fair value provided by the option) at exercise under AMT, and taxed when you sell under the normal tax rules.

Let's say you worked at Uber and you exercised ISOs at the IPO that had appreciated such that the bargain element at exercise was $1,000,000. You would owe 28% Federal + 7% California = $350,000 under AMT (ignoring a lot of other things for simplicity) in April 2020. When you sell your shares, you will be able to reclaim some of this tax through credits for AMT paid in previous years.

By the time the employee lockup expired in November 2019, the shares are trading 43% lower than the price you exercised at and are only worth ~$577K. You still have a $350K tax bill under AMT due in April 2020.

Because you exercised in 2019, you have an out - by selling the shares in a the same calendar year, you can lower the basis under AMT, but you give up the ability to pay long term capital gains rates on the sale (0-25% fed + 0-13.3% CA) and instead pay ordinary income tax rates (22-43% fed + 0-13.3% CA). Let's just say it would be 40% - you could reduce your tax bill to $231K by selling all of your shares.

You have until the employee trading window closes in mid-December to decide whether to hold onto your shares for the eventual preferential tax treatment, hoping they recover before the tax bill ruins you, or to double your tax rate to save money on taxes this year.

Now, the benefit of hindsight:

If you had sold all of your shares, you would have missed out on $330K in gains in the following 60 days. If you held all of your shares, you are still facing a hefty AMT bill and years of careful tax planning to reclaim the AMT credits you generated. Oh, and even if the shares 10x in value, you are still going to have >$100K in AMT credits that will probably take 10+ years to recover.

Harriette Kollman went to work for Boeing while her husband was fighting in World War II. She would later go on to become their first female computer programmer.

Unfortunately I don’t know more about her achievements in the field. I know the name because we get letters addressed to her sometimes, but she passed away a few years ago.

When I started at Uber back in early 2014, I didn't negotiate the offer at all. It seemed reasonable, so I accepted. Maybe I could have gotten more - but accepting has been, by far, the best decision of my career.

A couple of years ago, we purchased a used Tesla (2014 MS P85D+) from someone on Craigslist. The estimated value of the car in a private sale was $48-53K on TrueCar, and the buyer was asking $50K. We paid $50K. We haven't had any problems with the car, and ended up having some roof racks/equipment given to us for free later on by the seller because he didn't need them anymore. We even found out he had prepaid the next 5 years of maintenance with Tesla.

We just went under contract on a new house, and we negotiated the deal without a real estate agent representing us. This was the extent of the negotiation:

  - Us: We'll pay 6% below list, but you can save 3% because we don't have an agent.
  - Them: We'll accept 5% below list.
  - Us: Ok.

The house had already been reduced 13% from the original list price - it's near train tracks and we think that scared a lot of people away. But we visited open houses and listened to the trains several times and decided we weren't bothered by it - they go slow because of a nearby turn and never blow the horn. We felt the original pricing was in line with the market for something of the same quality fit/finish. So we got a new house for 20% less than we would have paid for a similar one in exchange for something that doesn't really bother us.

Also, the builder built his own house 20 feet away. We're going to be neighbors with the person we were negotiating with, and it would be better to be on good terms with them than to simply extract the maximum amount of value from them in the transaction. If anything in the house needs to be fixed in the future that isn't technically covered in the builder's warranty, they're more likely to work with us to fix it or help us get it fixed at a low cost. Plus they're our only neighbor and we're probably going to invite them over for dinner every now and then.

However, as much as I'm a fan of win/win dealmaking, I find it only works well when the other party is interested in a win/win. The first thing I do when I approach the negotiating table is assess whether the other party is a smarmy Glengarry Glen Ross/Art of The Deal jerk who is trying to rip me off. My solution to negotiating with one of these people is simple - don't. Just walk away. Leave the wolves to bite at each others' throats and find someone else to work with. You can only get ripped off if you put yourself into a situation where the people you are dealing with are trying to rip you off.

Donnie Darko’s release in October 2001 was very quiet after they pulled all advertising because a plane crash plays a prominent role in the plot.

The interesting thing about white collar fraud is that it rarely goes reported, and there are little repercussions unless it does. Companies care less about protecting other companies from harm than the risk of exposing themselves to claims of libel or slander by the accused. It's also not great press if people find out you hired a con-artist or allowed someone to steal from you because of your poor internal controls. A study in Norway found that 96% of cases of corporate fraud were not reported to authorities.[1] The financial and reputational costs of a company pursuing prosecution outweigh the benefits, and it's usually better to keep things quiet: terminate the individual and recoup whatever losses you are able to without involving the legal system.

Even in this scenario of blatant fraud, Arram stopped short of explicitly naming the individual. ZeroCater was saved a huge hiring mistake, but 'Sam' probably went on to another company that is clueless to his scam.

This is why I always ask why someone is looking for a new opportunity/why they left their previous position. If the answer doesn't add up, I press for more info. Maybe they're just embarrassed because they were fired? People get fired all the time for reasons that don't necessarily preclude them from being valuable to me. But if they still can't come up with an answer that makes sense, I start "noticing I'm confused".

[1]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01639625.2016.11...

I'd also argue that property taxes are a regressive form of wealth tax. For the average homeowner with a mortgage, they are taxed on an amount largely tied to the size of the mortgage and not their wealth. Also, most homeowner's primary source of net worth is equity in their homes, so they are effectively taxed on an amount exceeding their net worth.

Look at the following two individuals. Both live in $1MM homes with 1% property tax rates.

Individual A: - $200k equity in house - No other assets/savings - $10K property tax/year

Individual B: - $200k equity in house - $50MM stock portfolio - $10K property tax/year

A is paying 5% of their net worth in 'wealth' taxes, while B is paying 0.02% of their net worth in 'wealth' taxes. This is clearly absurd and should be fixed.

I'm relatively paranoid when it comes to privacy and also did 23andMe for similar reasons.

I stopped thinking of my DNA as a secret when I realized how impossible it is to keep other people from having access to it. Once someone knows it, you cannot change it like a password.

DNA is an anti-secret. You share it everywhere you go and cannot stop. It's no more secret or personal than your shoe size or height.

That’s not exactly how it works. The primary function of surge isn’t to redistribute a fixed pool of drivers - it’s to incentivize additional drivers to go online in an area with excess demand. For example, it used to be that surge would spike insanely high on big days like Halloween and New Years Eve because demand was drastically higher than supply. Once drivers saw other people making 8-10x surge, more people started signing on at these peak times and average surge went down.

Waymo designs and builds their own LIDAR units. As of almost 3 years ago, estimated costs per unit had fallen to $5,000.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/06/waymo-to-start-selling-sta...

From the proposal:

“drivers would earn a minimum of approximately $21 per hour while on a trip, including the costs of their average expenses.”

Except Toptal is a “startup” that took $1.5mm in seed funding from investors like Andreesen Horowitz and promised employees equity.

If the chain were public, individuals could look up their vote by the hash but would have no way of proving the hash was their vote.

To be fair, he directed people to a >500 page book on the subject as a good introduction to some of these ideas. Do you expect him to effectively summarize a massive text in a single HN comment?

Part of it is the waitstaff avoiding tax on tips, the other part is that it allows the business to avoid payroll tax on the majority of waitstaff's earnings. In order to get a waiter to an effective $10/hr after-tax income you'd have to pay $15-16/hr versus $2+$8 in tips.

Palmer left Facebook/Oculus last March.

And then those hefty taxes will be passed on in the form of rent. The non-resident never ends up on the hook.

I can only think of a couple occasions in my professional career where recursion made more sense than iteration. Both involved traversing trees with unknown depths (parsing XML and scanning a file system).

That hasn't stopped it from showing up in every programming interview I've ever done.

Sorry - when you said it altered your financial trajectory I assumed that to mean it represented a majority of your net assets. I'm in the process of diversifying a very concentrated portfolio (a year ago >95% of my net worth was in Uber stock) and may have projected my own concerns onto your situation.

Investing that large of a percentage of one's portfolio in any single company is extremely risky; even if it is a large, publicly traded giant like Microsoft or Amazon. In order for the investment to be successful, not only does the company have to do well, but their sector has to do well, their country's economy has to do well, and stocks as an asset class have to do well.

If you don't have hedges to insure against those risks, you are still essentially gambling with your principal. Even a Series A/B Ycombinator company probably has a double-digit percentage failure rate.

You are correct in saying Tesla is neither a Ponzi nor pyramid/MLM scheme, but you have erred in your distinction between the two.

A Ponzi scheme purports to have some amazing business opportunity, but secretly pays returns using money from new investors. They will often use MLM/pyramid-style recruiting tactics, and not solely rely on the fraudster for recruitment.

It's true that MLMs pay out fees collected from newer recruits, but everyone knows where the money is coming from. Usually MLMs also have some semblance of actual business activity (Mary Kay, Amway, Herbalife, etc.)

The wording is a bit confusing, but I believe they are saying that it would take that long to catch up to Buffett's current wealth. If you assume his assets continue to grow at the same pace as yours, you will never catch up.

No, they are owned and operated by Motivate. Citi has, essentially, bought ad placement - similar to putting your name on a sports arena.

The NFL has aggressively litigated uses of their trademarks, to the point where you might technically be allowed to do something, but realistically it isn’t worth the trouble.

https://www.thedsmgroup.com/super-bowl-trademark-copyright-2...

Terms like “Super Bowl” and “World Series” are trademarked, so advertisers use phrases like “the Big Game” or “baseball final championship series”, in this case, to avoid a lawsuit.

Jet.com hit it faster. As did APUS Group and Rong360.

Article is based on a false premise.

Why are you on this site if you don’t believe in early stage investing?

They have a network of independent contractors (regular people) that collect scooters off the street at night, charge them, and reposition/place them in the morning. The companies that win in the dockless electric space will be the ones that can most efficiently externalize these costs, not the ones who arrive first or buy the most scooters.

Brushless DC motor and lithium battery advancements are the primary tech enabling these devices, and both are commoditized. The winners in this market will be the people who can best externalize the cost of repositioning, charging, and storing these scooters.

The Xiaomi M365 scooters everyone is using were released Dec 15th, 2016. Bird started working on rigging them for rentals less than 6 months later and launched in August 2017.

If you have been following the developments in personal electric transportation, the timing is hardly random. The M365 was one of the first scooters that had the range and speed to be viable for rentals. The good idea was not low hanging, it was just taken by good founders before you realized it was good.