The article would be better if the author replaced "smartphone" with "smartphone screen". A ton of activities are made better by smartphones - a walk or a run with podcast or music, a drive or a bike ride with navigation, etc. It's specifically the screen that takes 100% of your attention and prevents you from daydreaming.
Thanks, looking forward! I don't know where most of your users are, but coming up with a safe road bike route in US suburbia is not a trivial problem. Current RWGPS planner routinely wants to take me to very dangerous roads (for a road cyclist). I hope your update will make it better.
I frequently use RWGPS for planning my bike rides but don't pay for it (yet!). Curious - is all routing done by graphhopper or do you have some secret sauce on your end? Also graphhopper web has regular bike mode and "racing bike", they tend to come up with different routes, wondering if it's incorporated on your side somehow or if there is a way to influence RWGPS algorithm to be more "road cycling" vs casual cycling (I think that's what graphhopper means by "racing").
I don't see any mentions of Google but I personally think it's Google that will be the main beneficiary of chaos at OpenAI. After all, weren't they the main competitors? Maybe not in product or business yet but on IP and hiring fronts?
My understanding is that in the US, earned wages (while employees were employed) are indeed employee claims. Not paying these is what YC guidance above says will lead to "very bad things."
After people are let go, severance and continuation of healthcare beyond some term mandated by law (maybe state, maybe federal, maybe varies by state, don't know) are not considered employee claims in this sense.
CEO and the board didn't follow the YC guidance mentioned above, and it's on them.
Good article. Bottom line is employees need to be aware what can happen and how future rounds of financing, among other things, could affect their equity comp. The more articles and blog posts about it, the better.
There is no one-size-fits-all recommendation though. Everybody is different, and everybody's situation is different. What works for me won't necessarily work for you.
Equity comp, especially in non-publicly-traded companies, indeed is closer to a lottery than a lot of people think, and articles like this are helpful because they are educating people about it.
Participate in 401k plan - yes, 99% people would benefit from starting as early as possible. Max out your per-paycheck 401k contribution (including in order to maximize employer match) - not always. The farther you are from retirement age, the bigger your opportunity cost is going to be (your 401k money is locked-in into retirement account).
There are also certain 401k rules that may play very hard against you. For example, take a look at mandatory withdrawals ("required minimum distribution" - RMD) for some types of retirement accounts in the US at certain age + how your retirement account suffers disproportionately if market is down when you start mandatory withdrawals.
I know the math you are talking about, it does make sense conceptually and that's why it's cited in all 401k materials, real life with its rules and uncertainty is bit more complicated.
"Your company will probably extend a term saying “We will match your contributions up to N% of your salary.” You should always and under every circumstance invest enough money to max out your employer match. It is free money if you take it."
This is a reasonable default option but not necessarily the best for everyone.
There is a flaw in this statement - you are encouraged to save more today in order to maximize amount of money in your retirement account, with side effect of some immediate tax savings (which btw will not be in absolute figures but will be in rate - if you save more to 401k, your tax rate will be lower but amount of tax you will pay will still be higher).
If you are too far from retirement and have other goals that will come before retirement that could be very important to you, it becomes a decision just like anything else, not a no-brainer.
This is because of tax law - you are very constrained in your ability to take money from 401k before retirement if you need it.
Focus on quarterly numbers is a side effect, which is unfortunate. You go public not because you want to report quarterly. You go public because you want public funding and potentially better terms than private funding.
Not entirely true. IPO as a process exists to allow companies to raise money from the public, especially when private funding is not available. Overhead, requirements and legalities are a side effect, and if you have any money in a public market (like 401(k) in US), you absolutely want that. I do.
When private funding is available, IPO is not needed by definition. And since comp structures are set up with the expectation of IPO or exit, it's employees who are affected.
If you are negotiating an offer with a private company, you should attempt to price the risk of having to forfeit your stock comp. This risk has increased recently (that's what this story is about) but most people still under-negotiate it in their offers.
I hope you are right and I hope it works out but I am skeptical.
I will give you a simple example. If you get a random sample of people in the US, I am afraid more than 90% of them won't even understand that investing 5K in a neighbor's kid's shiny new startup is not a binary proposition (invest or don't invest); one actually is buying N of something (shares, options, warrants, etc) for those 5K, with all sorts of properties like seniority, etc, etc, etc.
Regular people can understand a loan - I give a neighbor's kid 5K and get back 5K+3% in 1 year. But equity-based investment is significantly harder to grasp.
FWIW, personally I am not optimistic about this but would love to be proven wrong.
Information asymmetry, risk mismanagement, chasing quick riches, etc - too many reasons imho why startups are not a viable asset class for most people.