Europe’s old money mingles with tech startups

> to be honest I'm not really too sad that this culture hasn't really taken hold over here. Most 'old money' in Europe isn't old billionaire heirs anyway but the small and middle-sized business who treat their employees quite well, employ them for decades, don't lay them off at the first sign of trouble and so on.

That is increasingly less true for new businesses (although still less arbitrary than the US, although-although some would argue this is a form of agility necessary for startups) and was never due to the kind nature of business owners but due to post-ww2 tradition of worker-friendly politics and regulation backed by strong unions. The "old money" investors do not directly manage the startups any more than silicon valley VCs do theirs.

Also lot of those family firms avoid death duty /inheritance taxes which would raise eyebrows in other cultures.

The conventional wisdom is to just take cash because that comes out ahead most of the time and you have to personally fully value the money from a successful exit to make a salary plus equity offer be worth it to you. But the math on early startup offers certainly can be and sometimes is fair.

Certainly agree that the business culture of the sturdy, monied middle class should be preserved.

The modal startup company fails and any equity grants or options are worth nothing. The modal employee of a company that is extremely liberal with equity because it was a startup before it found product market fit is AppAmaGooBookSoft, Oracle, Stripe or Uber. AppAmaGooBookSoft must hire at least 50,000 software engineers a year between them. YC may have funded that many founders in its entire history. Possibly over YC’s entire history all the startups whose equity went to zero have had 500,000 employees though that seems high. Google alone has over 100,000 employees right now. If AppAmaGooBookSoft don’t have half a million employees who get substantial portions of their compensation in stock right now I’ll be very surprised.

IIRC the "rule of thumb" is that the first batch of employees share 10% of equity, the next batch get 10%, etc but each batch is much larger than the previous (e.g. from <10 to 10s-100s to 1000s).

So as an early employee you'd get a single-digit % but if you come in the next phase you'll get permill(s) & later on even less.

These people will put down $1 million dollar deposit to make it seem like they are serious about completing a deal, and will just let the timeline expire forfeiting the entire deposit!

Forget about the negative interest rates. Unless you can tap into the high yield corporate debt market, then dealing with these rich people is hopeless.

Source: Been around a lot of wealthy Europeans that talked a big game. It is the most ridiculous stable business climate on Earth. I do not recommend, especially for tech.