Comment by expathacker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by expathacker | Hacker News Reader

"Cash Rules Everything Around Me." -- Wu-Tang Clan.

I'm old and jaded, but salary should be your primary metric. Stock options are worthless. I took a 50% cut at PagerDuty (YC10) for 2% of the stock options, they're now worth $1bn+ and screwed me pretty hard, the day after my father died. They didn't even offer any severance pay until I pointed out how much damage I could do to their reputation, then they gave me a week. Start-ups, especially run by new founders, don't know how to treat people humanely. Thanks guys. Since then my attitude is, "Fuck you, pay me". You will not win the start-up lottery. If they don't offer an 83(b) election, you could end up in the red if they do exist. This happened frequently in 2001, it even lead to several infamous suicides.[1]

Are you 200% sure you will last the 3/6 month signing-bonus waiting period? If not you could end up with a liability greater than the value of the bonus. I had this when when a start-up outsourced ops to LoudCloud. They contested our unemployment claim and I spent $3k in legal fees fighting them, in the middle of the start-up recession.

Start-ups will not invest in you as an employee, and will drop you without a second thought. Expect to spend all of your free time learning new skills just so you don't get fired.

[1] https://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=17123680

(edited for spacing, and to add the anecdote about severance pay)

I will be considered old by some youngsters, though in my head I'm still 17. And as an "elder", I'll concur that what said here by "old and jaded" is true:

Cash is king, startups will want you to feel "family" but you'll never be one. In the unlikely event equity is worth anything, converting it to cold hard cash is not always straight forward. In other words - take the money.

> In the unlikely event equity is worth anything, converting it to cold hard cash is not always straight forward.

People rarely seem to understand this. A successful exit doesn't necessarily mean employees will get paid. A friend experienced this when Google bought the start-up he had been at for 2 years. Employees had to wait a year for an earn-out period. They had to re-interview for their positions, and fired if they didn't meet Google's impossibly high standards.

(edited to clean-up a grammatical error)

Do you think all engineers at DeepMind had to re-interview at Google when DeepMind was taken over?

The mere act of asking this question makes your speculation more valid than mine, since I have never paid a moment's interest to the going-ons of the ML market. Maybe? Maybe not?

Gayle Laakmann has offered coaching for acquisition interviews for a few years now. So apparently it is a thing. http://www.gayle.com/blog/2014/02/05/now-offering-acquisitio...

That's one good thing to know.

An exit is not necessarily "a successful exit" There are lots of exits that look successful from the outside, but are not for the founders or their employees. The investors have to get paid first and usually by time they are done taking their slice of the pie there's nothing but crumbs left.

Also many "successful exists" are so because there is some monetary gain, but the gain is minimal considering the amount of time invested and money lost during that time. I had a couple of those. The experience gained was worth more than the money.

I hope you don't mind me bookmarking this (very astute) comment and using it as part of my chat with folks as to why they shouldn't work for a startup.

How did PagerDuty screw you? By firing you?

Yeah. Probably because he had 2% of the options, and they wanted to claw it back from him.

I don’t think firing gets rid of vested options, right?

Right, but OP said he was fired before he had options vested.

So he took 2% options at a 50% pay cut, but then got fired and that screwed him out of the 2% options before he could vest.

Welcome to the valley.

Ugh, I shouldn't post while 1/2 awake on 12 hour flights. PagerDuty fired me before I was vested. I was 1/2 evangelist, and 1/2 "DevOps" but took the 50% pay cut so that I could focus more on evangelism, I don't really like tech work anymore, I don't feel like my contribution is significant enough just being a grunt. During AWS Re:invent I signed us some major customers, but we had a bad outage, so they fired me for the AWS outage. Really. I think it was an excuse, and pg, or some other YC advisor told them to fire me and take back the stock options. After I pointed out how jacked up this was, they offered to bring me back as a contract evangelist, but I hold grudges.

Thank you, I will not be doing business with PagerDuty (YC10) anymore.

Me too. My team bought a subscription a few months ago, I'll try to push a switch to a competitor.

Why? This was a decade ago, and they were basically children when it happened. The product itself is a fine product and I've used it with about 35 consulting customers since, there aren't too many other options, and none of them are as good as PagerDuty.

As long as there's an option, I'll use it. Unless they have made amends by screwing you out of $20 million, there's no reason to support this kind of behavior, even if it happened 8 years ago.

If they were children, why were they running a company? Why would anyone join a company run by children?

This sounds pretty painful, maybe not something you'd want to talk about. But if you're up for it I'm sure a lot of us would like to hear more...

Edit to add: That link describes in fairly precise detail the nature of the person's death. If you think that isn't something you want to read, give it a miss.

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