Friend of mine got about $900k in RSUs over 4 years from Twitter about 1 year pre IPO. Obviously the $ number is dependent on share price, may be down to $600k now. He was an engineering team lead, ex-Google and ex-MS.
re: why would the company give away money once that has happened?
"Post-employment relationship mgmt". There are huge rewards to keeping good relationships and huge costs to not (e.g. referring potential engineers looking for work, word of mouth referrals on working there, etc).
Hey all - I am the writer of this piece on startupnorth - my name is Dan Morel, I am at @dpmorel. Annoyingly I caught it on Hacker News probably too late to have an impact on the comments.
Probably all of you folks complaining below find the arguments absurd and abnoxious because they discriminate against you (being a single, young, male doing a startup).
Well, guess what, most of the entire startup eco-system is discriminatory and proclaims similar absurd arguments against people with family... and its doubly so against women.
So if you don't have the mental capacity to appreciate irony, than go f yourselves.
I think the "most intelligent" Google line is also crap-ola. My friends who ended up working at Google were not the best of the bunch at all, especially vs the ones I know at start-ups. I've worked at start-ups that had dev teams that could eat every google developer I know for lunch.
no, really, thats wrong. There are no analogies. Selling an idea and "democratic" innovation processes are as big company as it gets. Verizon does the same thing for the love of god.
We scraped Yahoo Mail for about 6 months quite heavily. We had to keep it at a >5 minute timer otherwise we got captchas during the auth process, or we got locked out for 24 hours with error 999.
We now have a formal agreement with Yahoo, but during the process Yahoo indicated they had an informal open policy on scraping. Note that they have an initiative to open up all services within the next year or so (google Yahoo Open Strategy to read more about timelines).