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I’m not a gamer, but I imagine most are smart enough to see through this cringe-y PR disaster. Late Friday night dump of nonsense corporate speak is painfully predictable. This will do more harm than good. Yikes.

Other than eBay, guessing the reason why the payment cos are dropping out first is because they have the highest regulatory/compliance burden as is, and don’t need more scrutiny dealing with something they don’t even fully understand just so they can win some brownie points with FB.

Just because you choose not to work on a project due to personal reasons doesn’t free you of the unethical or immoral things the company you chose to work for does. And if you actually believe it does then it only supports the argument that these firms have found a way to act immorally in the pursuit of fees while making sure their staff don’t become too demoralized. They know there will always be someone to take on the work because the workforce is highly fungible so they don’t care either way, and if anything makes them look compassionate to their employees which benefits them.

I want to see the terms of service agreement. Does anyone know if you can sue for wrongful injury or death? Or do you waive your rights away to Google?

Immorality is subjective. McKinsey is hired to (maximize|minimize) some objective. The fact someone didn’t want to work on the Purdue Pharma opioid marketing project when McKinsey employs a fungible pool of thousands of consultants means nothing.

A lot of good, decent human beings justify doing awful things in their day job. Wasn’t there just a post on here a few days ago about someone who worked at Capital One writing about how everyone working there justified getting poor people deeper in debt?

Selecting a few outliers and calling it a “trend” is ridiculous.

Honestly I wish there was a stricter policy on HN for posting corporate content marketing puff pieces. These a16z blog posts do nothing more than hype companies in their portfolio.

By far the most egregious example of western firms working with China are management consulting companies like McKinsey that work directly with governments on expensive contracts, including of course China.

I mean, in those cases they are often writing the playbook for the government when it comes to implementing certain policies. Crazy that is even legal for a western firm.

No. It completely depends on how you hold your crypto. If you are storing it on an exchange it’s completely up to the exchange to credit your wallet, which they don’t necessarily have an obligation to do.

This is actually fairly common now, unfortunately. Many reports of Uber drivers being tricked into getting their account hacked using this method to obtain the 2FA pin sent via SMS so they can drain their balance or switch the bank account on file.

Airbnb search is terrible. I also can’t understand why they don’t let you save filters e.g. if I’m always searching for an entire place with 1 bedroom then let me save and apply that filter to every search.

No 1500 is number of tech employees.

See https://www.theinformation.com/articles/wework-plans-to-shed...

You mean 1500 people.

Why is this the top comment. What does that have to do with this story at all?

They are worried about downed power lines causing fires...SF being urban does not really need to worry about downed power lines causing a forest fire within the city

Do you live in SF? After working in tech in the bay for 6 years I’ve sort of had enough of the tech unicorn life. The greed and sociopathic tendencies got to me more than anything.

He wants to target farmers because it’s an emotional play against a specific country’s exports...

It’s more tangible than adding a tariff to some obscure machine part because it becomes a pride thing. Also politicians of every country are acutely sensitive to the needs of their farmers.

Testing only tells you whether a certain drug is in something. It doesn’t tell you if it contains something else as well.

The odds of winning the CA lottery is 1 in 42 million. There are fewer than a million residents in SF. I don’t know the exact number of startup winners (both founders and employees who made more than $1m) living in SF at this moment but I would conservatively estimate something in the 5k range.

If you’re joining an early stage venture backed startup and demanding only a salary and no equity, you’ll feel much worse if your startup finds any reasonable level of success because you demanded 20k more a year in salary over something that could be much more than that.

You’re not risking your life savings by joining a venture backed startup as an employee. In the worst case you write off a few thousand dollars you spent exercising some options while making a market rate salary (because you negotiated).

The point is you forward exercise when you are granted when you start your job, so no you wouldn’t have vested anything at that point.

I see it on HN all the time. People are literally telling others to assume their equity grant is $0. People are even saying this of private late stage startups that issue RSUs.

If you want to make a gambling analogy, I’d say making money off your equity grant at an early stage company is more like playing Roulette (with a better payout) than buying a lottery ticket. Sure, it’s uncommon to win (in this case hit your number) but it happens with decent frequency.

I didn’t stay for 6 years. I don’t work there anymore. And like I said, the company will likely raise soon, potentially at a much higher valuation. There is a comparable company that is already public that is trading at a much higher valuation.

I also didn’t say my experience is/was common, but it certainly was not the same as winning the lottery. That is my point.

I’m glad someone said it. So tired of the advice I constantly hear on HN to assume your grant is worthless.

I forward exercised my stock options when I started a job for $7k in 2013. Last December I was able to sell some that valued my initial grant at $1.3m (still private but probably will raise at higher value or go public soon). Because I forward exercised I paid taxes at the 2013 value of the company, which was basically nothing. And I only pay long term capital gains when I sell, which is less than the earned income tax rate.

Of course there is a certain element of luck involved, but to say that the mathematical probability of building wealth from your share of equity in a startup is the same probability as winning the lottery is completely disingenuous.

Most full time employees at VC backed companies will receive stock comp as part of their compensation.

You need to provide liquidity to your shareholders at some point, so yes. Investors and employees have been waiting 10 years to cash out. They helped build the business and deserve to be rewarded at a certain point. A decade is stretching it IMO.

Eh. I don’t think it’s a good idea for a startup still going through rapid change (whether releasing new product lines, entering new markets, testing new pricing) to go public, since as soon as you do it’s hard to be “experimental.”

There are, however, private companies whose business models have largely stabilized like Airbnb and Stripe that I agree should’ve gone public already.

Yes, which is why you should be negotiating for more RSUs to compensate for the additional risk and illiquidity.

My point is that if you join a startup thinking your equity is and will forever be worthless, then why do you care if you get 10 or 10000 shares? To not care is bad advice for anyone joining a company that has a path toward IPO or acquisition. And if you don’t think a startup has any path then why are you joining a company that is offering you equity comp in the first place?

Honestly this is bad advice. Sure, you shouldn’t plan your life around striking it rich but if you’re going to take a job thinking the equity comp is worthless then you are probably choosing the wrong company and/or going to negotiate poorly.

Late stage growth companies that offer RSUs can be sold on secondary markets, so even though it’s not as easy to sell it is probably not worth 0 unless something is very wrong, which again is something you should assess before accepting any offer.

I wouldn’t say he “predicted” anything unless I’m missing something. He commented on the S-1 after it was released.

He also gave a glowing take on Smile Direct Club the day before the IPO, which has tanked 50% in a few weeks and had the biggest IPO flop in a decade, so YMMV.