Emil Bay emilbayes

Who pays when startup employees keep their equity?

JD Maturen, 2016/07/05, San Francisco, CA

As has been much discussed, stock options as used today are not a practical or reliable way of compensating employees of fast growing startups. With an often high strike price, a large tax burden on execution due to AMT, and a 90 day execution window after leaving the company many share options are left unexecuted.

There have been a variety of proposed modifications to how equity is distributed to address these issues for individual employees. However, there hasn't been much discussion of how these modifications will change overall ownership dynamics of startups. In this post we'll dive into the situation as it stands today where there is very near 100% equity loss when employees leave companies pre-exit and then we'll look at what would happen if there were instead a 0% loss rate.

What we'll see is that employees gain nearly 3-fold, while both founders and investors – particularly early investors – get dilute

Collaborator Guidelines

Now where you are a collaborator you have certain powers that you should use carefully, so I'm listing some guidelines here.

Contributing

Proposing a Change

Even though as a contributor you could push directly to master, please don't do that. Instead each bug fix or feature

using reputation systems to create shared function-critical datastructures in open networks

Search engines, spam filtration, and p2p protocols - all need to rate the value of information. Search engines need it to provide good results; spam filtration needs it to exclude noise; and p2p networks need it for security and efficiency.

What is "value?" I'll use two dimensions:

Quality (how useful the information is). The more permissive participation is, the greater the need for quality-ranking. Term-frequency search alone fails for the Web, because the Web doesn't prefilter for quality.
Trust (how safe the information is to use). The more function-critical the information is, the greater the need for trust-ranking. If a DHT's host-lookup can be manipulated to flood an unsuspecting computer (a DDoS) then the DHT is unsound.

intro

we've had great success building modular database stuff on top of leveldb with node, but as I have learnt more about databases it's become apparent to me that the idea of a modular database would be better implemented at a slightly lower level.

Level db provides a sorted key:value store, which, because of the sorted property, many things can be implemented on top of. For example, for replication, or for consistent materialized views, we often need a write ahead log. This can easily be implemented via a batch write to level, and writing the log into a section of the leveldb key space which is treated as append only.

Sankey Barchart

Info

Provides a visualization similar to google analytics shopper behavior analytics.

Requires

d3js
underscorejs

NOTE I'm trying to find the most optimal fav/touch icon setup for my use-cases. Nothing new here. Read Mathias Bynens' articles on re-shortcut-icon and touch icons, a FAQ or a Cheat Sheet for all the details.

I'd like to hear how you approach this: @valuedstandards or comment on this gist.

The issue

You have to include a boatload of link elements pointing to many different images to provide (mobile) devices with a 'favicon' or 'touch icon':

![Touch Icon Links](https://o.twimg.com/2/proxy.jpg?t=HBj6AWh0dHBzOi8vcGhvdG9zLTYuZHJvcGJveC5jb20vdC8yL0FBRGFGY1VRN1dfSExnT3cwR1VhUmtaUWRFcWhxSDVGRjNMdXFfbHRJWG1GNFEvMTIvMjI3OTE2L3BuZy8xMDI0eDc2OC8yL18vMC80L1NjcmVlbnNob3QlMjAyMDE1LTA0LTE0JTIwMTYuNTYuMjYucG5nL0NNejBEU0FCSUFJZ0F5Z0JLQUkvNGR1eDZnMzZmYnlzYWI3

	npm config set loglevel http
	npm config set progress false
	npm config set package-lock false
	npm config set save false
	mkdir -p ~/.config/configstore/
	printf '{"optOut": true,"lastUpdateCheck": 0}' > ~/.config/configstore/update-notifier-npm.json

	* {
	font-size: 12pt;
	font-family: monospace;
	font-weight: normal;
	font-style: normal;
	text-decoration: none;
	color: black;
	cursor: default;
	}

	var timeoutStacks = (function () {
	var $timers = require('timers');
	var $setInterval = $timers.setInterval;
	var $setTimeout = $timers.setTimeout;

	var stacks = {};

	global.setInterval = function (fn, timeout) {
	var stack = new Error().stack;

	$ cat package.json
	{
	"name": "gulpstartcmd",
	"version": "1.0.0",
	"scripts": {
	"start": "which gulp"
	},
	"devDependencies": {
	"gulp": "^3.8.10"
	}