Thanks for the heads up about the whitelist feature. I would also like to be able to record all my activity locally and not send anything to the server. It would make RescueTime more useful and eliminate my privacy concerns.
In this kind of forum that encourages entrepreneurship even in the face of stiff competition I'm surprised that many people dismiss the notion that someone could make a better seed funding organization than YC.
There are many successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere who would be great startup advisors and inspiration leaders. If they decided to start YC clones I don't see why they couldn't attract great talent. They may even be more successful than YC at generating high returns on their investment. Luck plays a huge factor in startup success, after all...
By my experience (I've gotten job offers from a few startups), most startups (especially after their series A) offer employees (at least engineers) a miniscule amount of equity (a small fraction of a percent). Even if these companies would have great exits (tens of millions), their engineers would hardly get enough for a down payment on a house in the Bay Area.
Summary: don't expect the equity you get from working at a startup (unless you're a VP or an executive) to be worth much. Google-like events where many employees got rich are few and far between. If you do work for an existing company, I suggest looking at salary more than equity as a means of making money. The difference between making 120k vs 80k over 4 years is 160k -- more than you're likely to get from options, and less risky.
Is Giles saying that with the help of Rubinius you can do Lisp-style code generation in Ruby? I don't know much about Rubinius but this doesn't sound right. Lisp macros let you manipulate the program's AST in compile time very easily because the AST is made of sexp's, just like the program code itself. This is due to the peculiar Lisp syntax. Lisp code generation seems quite different from the monkey patching techniques demonstrated in the presentation. Am I missing something?
I guess it depends on your definition of risk. The definition I was going by is the chance of getting a decent payout after spending 4 years of your life working somewhere. If you work for someone else's startup, especially for a tiny amount of equity, you risk forgoing the opportunity to enjoy the financial benefits of a successful exit after 4 years of hard work.
A founder can also get a job in 10 minutes if the startup flops. The additional sacrifice (not necessarily risk) the founders take is living a few months without salary. This sacrifice obviously merits a higher portion of the equity than an employee -- maybe even much higher -- but as an employee you have to wonder whether the tiny equity you'll get is worth it.
I'm not sure how the equity is currently divided, but these are very good questions, thanks. The company had an A round and it has about 10-15 employees.
I should have said that founders are exposed to greater risk in the very early days of the company, but afterwards the chance of meaningful financial payoff for employees becomes much smaller. Most startups won't be the next Google or Ebay, and I think they should take that into consideration when incenting their employees with stock options.
It's risky in the sense that the chance of a meaningful payoff is much smaller. I don't mind living on ramen for a while if it made the "dream" tangible.
If the difference between a founder and an employee were, say, 5x to 10x the equity, being an employee may make sense, but if it's 100x-400x range it just makes the employee stock options look pathetic.
I agree. Despite the guidelines, I can see this potentially being used to spread rumors, gossip, lie, or just stuff that's plain unflattering on people. I doubt many people will be actively monitoring their Biographicon profile and this content could go undetected for a while, causing the subjects real harm.