Juul is reportedly laying off 800 to 950 employees
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
As well, given people's concerns about keeping their lungs healthy, I imagine 'discretionary' consumption of vapes would be down as well.
People quitting with the goal of keeping their lungs healthy may have an impact, but you could similarly move up the "addiction" chain and reasonably say that there's got to be a decent number of smokers who are looking at this coronavirus as the sign from god they needed to begin quitting. Juul, and vapes in general, are that next step.
My suspicion is that this has little to do with the coronavirus, and more to do with lingering effects from the government pressure months ago. Juul stopped production of every decent flavor they had. Even long time Juul users I know have moved on from Juul and on to other products. They're, in essence, the lightning rod of the industry. Kids don't vape Juul anymore; they haven't for months. They're on cali bars, or even devices like the suorin air. Are those going to get the same pressure Juul did? Probably not. The zeitgeist has moved on.
But as a millennial myself I do see fewer and fewer of my friends purchasing Juul / pods.
The distinction you're making is meaningless because it's all the same group of assholes. They decided to play cute tricks with their branding because the general public came to recognize them as assholes. It's no different than the mercenary company 'Blackwater' rebranding itself to 'Academi' after it became notorious.
Wow, I'd totally missed that. Going full 180 from the comically evil-sounding Blackwater to the modern and vaguely nerdy Academi, complete with hipster-friendly spelling variant, sounds like something straight out of a comedy sketch.
Under standard terms, options can't be sold, ever. Shares that were purchased from options that were early-exercised and have not vested can be forcibly repurchased at the company's choice (not employee's choice) upon termination. Shares that were purchased from options that had already vested can only be sold if there's a secondary market at that moment, but presumably Juul is not laying off a thousand employees at the same time as it's raising external money, so no.
> ... can be forcibly repurchased at the company's choice ...
For the sake of argument, what is the repurchase price here, and if the company "repurchase" it, does the money go to the employees?
For the curious, you will commonly see such onerous terms in YC startups: https://www.clerky.com/yc-stock-plan-forms
The grant date is when stock options are granted to an employee - this is usually the first time the employee will have heard of their access to the options but if they are fore-warned of the options before a formal grant and schedule is release then they may be ineligible for any immediate vesting (generally immediate vesting triggers must happen after the grant date). The vesting date is when an option becomes eligible to exercise - on that date the grantee receives the ability to purchase shares in the company according to the strike price laid out in the options grant. Lastly you have the exercise date, that's the date on which you actually exchange some cash for some real shares in the company - after this point those shares are you personal property and are fully owned by you with no obligations to sale (though obligations around the manner of sale usually remain) - a company could declare bankruptcy but you can retain those shares forever.
Just as a note - I'm not a lawyer or an accountant, none of the information above should be construed as financial or legal advice and might just be wrong... if you're actually dealing with an options grant speak to a lawyer.
> The company shall ... for a period of three months from such date to repurchase all or any portion of the Unvested Shares (as defined below) held by Purchaser as of the Termination Date at the original purchase price per Share (adjusted for any stock splits, stock dividends and the like)
You wouldn't lose any money, they'd basically reverse the early exercise.
Employer: Welcome aboard. You get 1000 shares vesting over 4 years. They're currently worth $1 per share, which will be your price no matter when you buy them from us. You can buy the ones that have vested at any time until you leave, but you can't sell them until we've gone public.
You: Great!
Employer: You know, there's a tax trap you could fall into when you leave, whether that be before the 4 years are up, or after. If we haven't IPO'd yet, but we've done a series C at $10/share, you will surely want to buy them as you leave. But you can't sell them yet, and the kicker is that the IRS says that the act of buying them for $1,000 when they're worth $10,000 means you have a $9,000 profit in the transaction, and they'll want to collect taxes on that (say, $3,000). And you may not have the cash to manage that. Even if you do, and then the stock craters later, and you've already paid the taxes, you don't get a refund of the $3,000 in tax the next filing season; rather, you get to subtract $3,000 from any other stock gains you have (in any subsequent year), should you be so lucky. Oh, and even if we have gone public by the time you leave, if you want to hold onto your shares, you've still got exactly the same problem: pay tax now, be out the cash, and lose big if the stock tanks.
You: Fooey.
Employer: But! Have we got a deal for you! It turns out that the IRS says it's fine if you kind-of buy your shares from us now, for $1,000. (Frequently at startups: We'll even give you a bonus to cover it!) Then, when you leave after 5 years, it's a no-op as far as the IRS is concerned, and you can hold the shares until you want to sell, and at that point you have a gain that you pay taxes on, which you can certainly pay out of your cash profits!
You: Super!
Employer: The only thing is, if you leave, say, after 3 years, really you would have only vested on 3/4 your shares, so what we'll do is only hand you 750 shares (that you vested on), and a $250 refund of the rest of the $1,000 you gave us.
You: Yes, that's more than fair!
Aside from that weirdness a share in a company is yours and I'm quite skeptical you could be forced to sell it back to the company - what _is_ common is that the grantor will reserve the right of first purchase. If you decide to sell your vested and exercised options to a third party (say a random friend) you cannot legally transact that without first offering the companies the ability to purchase it at the price of their choosing.
The result of this is that vested and exercised shares are usually a terrible idea in nearly every scenario - except when that action might result in some tax benefits from long term investment[1].
1. Some jurisdictions waive capital gains taxes on sales of stock if the shares were held for a "long" time usually several years.
Early exercise.
Do I have this right or am I misunderstanding the scenario?
Edit: Apparently the Canadian portion is important - US options are wack and work totally differently to normal options!
Not quite. Say one has a vesting schedule of 100/year for 5 years. Early exercise would allow one to "purchase" 500 shares on day 1, with the caveat that they be returned if the vesting schedule isn't met, e.g. if the employee leaves on day 2.
> US options are wack and work totally differently to normal options
"Normal" options, European-style options, make up the minority of instruments described by the term "options". Stock options are negotiated instruments. They vary wildly from case to case.
Certain amount of consolidation occurs in different jurisdictions as a result of tax codes. But in a global scheme, early exercise is entirely normal for employee stock options.
Buried but smoking cigarettes was trending down for years then e-cigs, mostly Juul, caused it to skyrocket
e-cig (nicotine and some liquids to make it a vape) is up quite a lot; but, it looks like children are not converting from e-cig use to tobacco use, which was a fear that I had when I was earlier considering e-cigs.
My fear was basically that if enough people start using e-cigs and want to "graduate" to tobacco use, then over all tobacco use will increase. That does not seem to be happening in high school students.
It's definitely not good that a quarter of highschoolers are indulging in a highly addictive substance; but, I think there are other means of managing that than making the product illegal or tasteless.
All of that adds up to people who think JUUL is safer or can help them quit but it actually gets them hooked even more.
It’s like trying to cure a coffee addiction by switching to a shot of espresso. It might look like cutting back but it’s really doubling up.
[1]https://gen.medium.com/confessions-of-a-juul-junkie-6b5ce4a8...
They chose the nicotine concentration to mimic the delivery of a regular cigarette. Not less or more, but the same.
A pod will deliver the same amount of nicotine to a user as 20 cigarettes.
A 10-second hit is nowhere near the same as smoking an entire cigarette. It has the same feeling as an equivalent drag on a smoke.
The true danger of smoking cigarettes is not the nicotine - that's simply the vessel by one gets addicted. The true danger is the tar and other carcinogenic by-products of inhaling a combusted tobacco plant.
Anecdotally, I started smoking cigarettes as a university undergraduate. I used Juuls (and other e-cigarettes, both disposable and refillable) to help me quit, and I'm now nicotine and tobacco free.
When I smoked cigarettes, I would wake up every morning hacking my lungs out. I smelled awful. I couldn't engage in cardiovascular exercise for longer than a minute.
With e-cigarettes, my coughing went away and my lung capacity returned to approximately normal. In fact, I competed in two Spartan Beast races while addicted to e-cigs.
Juul is an awful company for marketing towards children, but it's no exaggeration to say that e-cigarettes saved my life.
So if middle schoolers everywhere suddenly started chewing nicorette gum you would think it’s totally harmless? I suspect not.
Sorry I can't stop puffing on this thing while I type.
I couldn't care less about anyone who helped make that happen. Scum of the earth.
"the potential for harm reduction for adult smokers while combating underage use."
<<insert photo of all the yummy flavors available>>
If their mandate was really harm reduction they could do that with a "plain" flavor; that's how we stop the kids in my house from eating all the yogurt.
It is one of the great tragedies of our time that tobacco companies got vaping lumped in with smoking and its harms, when it is at least two orders of magnitude safer.
https://www.businessinsider.com/juul-congress-e-cigs-target-...
"The memo accused Juul of knowingly marketing products to teens by holding programs at schools and camps and recruiting teens as "Juul influencers.""
"The hearing's testimony included claims that a Juul representative once visited a high-school classroom and told students that Juul e-cigarettes were "totally safe," according to a memo from congressional investigators."
I’ll happily continue drinking my fruity loops flavored vodka and enjoying its taste.
Fruity mango flavor did. The idea that only children find flavors appealing is asinine, and you should feel shame for participating in a moral panic that is leading directly to cancer and death.
What I, a consenting adult, choose to do for recreation and stress relief, is none of your goddamn business, and I suggest you butt out of it.
People have this weird condescending view towards smokers. Like they see themselves as morally superior beings.
It's quite infuriating and you can see that mindset reflect itself in how people approach these topics.
Fuck me for enjoying a flavored vice.
Vaping mostly just gives you the Nicotine hit, which doesn’t have the same dangers as tobacco smoke. Of all the vices I ever picked up, vaping has the smallest footprint in terms of character change while consuming it, and long term health consequences.
We probably need more studies on standard Nicotine consumption, as it may be in the same class as caffeine dependency:
https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/Nicotine_I...
Now, about the kids. I think they will mostly get high on vape pens. Juul won’t even be there jam honestly.
A parallel could be made to childhood obesity. Yes, soft drinks contribute, but with parent's logic, all flavored soft drinks should be made illegal in favor of, well, 'plain carbonated water' flavor. Yum! Won't somebody please think of the children!
Keep me out of your Orwellian utopia, thanks.
When some (alleged) offense is committed, intent matters. So the question is, when the company came up with those flavors and marketing, who did they have in mind? Do they have Powerpoints showing that middle-aged executives love them, or did they explicitly, knowingly target kids?
frankly I don't know whether the people at juul had malicious intentions wrt teenage vaping, but I really resent the line of argument that offering enjoyable flavors implies targeting children. this is actually one of the main things that makes vaping a viable substitute for me and many other people. if they only made plain vapes, I would probably just go back to smoking.
CEO's, will seeing Juul on a resume preclude you from hiring that person, even if they are a technical fit?
What about Uber, Google, AirBnb, Amazon, Amazon subsidiaries?
How are you going to convince others that they should pass on those too based on your particular ethical code?
Facebook is a tool used by hundreds of millions of people to connect with their friends and family. Google is a search engine and video platform. Amazon sells everything. AWS underpins a large portion of the internet most people use today. Uber provides taxi and food-delivery services.
Unlike Juul, what these companies do isn't inherently evil or exploitative.
I don't know what it is about Google that is supposed to be addictive so I'm not even going to try to respond to that part.
Also, because we made a mistake decades ago doesn't mean we aren't allowed to complain about or correct it now. Cigarette smoking is a fine example of that. It was a mistake to start, but now that we better understand how bad it is for people, we're slowly ending it.
Two, I'm not making a positive claim that it's not addictive. I'm saying that it's not inherently addictive like an addictive substance that physiologically changes your brain and neurochemical pathways (i.e., nicotine). I fully accept that Facebook is addictive in the same way as video games, exercise, food, or sex, in that it generates a dopamine response.
I also didn't argue that it needs to be "'corrected'". So again, I don't need to prove anything.
And I don't think this is about my particular ethical code. Any company I work at is going to be focused on delivering value to users, not harming them. Creating value for others is fundamental to commerce, so it makes good business sense to hire people who care about that.
Every recruitment process I've ever been involved in required unanimity for a hire. I don't need to explain my blackball.
Incidentally, the same applies to Facebook and a number of other companies striving on less than ethical products.
It is very reductive of you to just group people into being comic book villains.
The kids being addicted to nicotine weren't even collateral damage. They were being explicitly targeted. Doing good doesn't excuse doing evil.
I work in a company with a lot of coops and just in the past three years a lot of the folks we've hired on have a nicotine addiction - there are more people in their twenties that vape or smoke than people in their thirties or forties.
If targeting that demographic inherently means that highschoolers will look at them and think they're cool, does that mean nobody should ever target that demographic? Harm reduction only applies to the 30+ crowd?
edit: I also don't think that it's really fair to say that they advertised towards children. The worst they did was push some colorful and fruity flavors. I guess only children like sweet things, and once you turn 18 you can no longer like mangoes?
> They targeted them at young adults
This is literally the same bullshit the same industry was spewing when they were advertising their cigarettes with cartoon characters (e.g. the cartoon camel.)
What's the argument here? That they should have casted 40 year olds for their marketing campaign? Or that they should have casted someone in their 20s instead of an 18 year old? The former is ridiculous and the latter doesn't make a difference. Natalia Dyer is 25 years old and plays an 18 year old in Stranger Things.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/09/juul-gave-presentati...
The were speaking directly to students inside schools. Kids. They were telling them that their products were safe. You don't see toy companies doing that.
As evidence - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/e-cigarettes-around-95-le...
Now, I'm not saying it's safe. I'm not saying Juul didn't market unethically - just "vaping is better than smoking"
And if you can accept this overwhelmingly clear evidence - the cynic in you might ponder why there's an outrage over vaping, whilst cigarettes are still happily sold/taxed/lobbied.
Indeed. Note Altria's large investment in Juul.
However, much of Juul's innovation was figuring out how to evade tobacco laws and regulations such as bans on advertising and flavored tobacco products (e.g. by claiming to not be a tobacco product) and how to escape much of the stigma associated with tobacco (e.g. by making something that looked more like an Apple product and less like a cigarette.)
Evading legislation and industry regulation is a powerful business strategy while it lasts - consider Airbnb (avoided hotel tax), Uber/Lyft (avoided taxi medallion limits), Paypal (avoided bank regulation) and cable companies (avoided telecom regulation while providing phone service.)
What a bunch of bullshit.
If Juul's service was solely and specifically helping people get off cigarettes, great. It's not though, is it? They sell nicotine to minors. If they cared about doing good, they would simply not sell nicotine to minors. By this judgement I can group the executives at Juul into villians and not be 'reductive' about it, because it's very clear they make profit off of evil when they don't have to.
I'd also not like to see the argument that they aren't technically 'selling' juuls too minors. We're way past that point; it's super obvious the advertising is made up in such a way as to facilitate profits from minors. Just because it goes through a 3rd party doesn't eliminate blame from Juul, who remember have taken no steps to prevent children from smoking them.
A more straightforward explanation is that the altruistic mission was always fake.
What kills smokers is the uncountable number of toxins in tobacco smoke.
Addiction is generally a result of some failure in a person's social life and social structure that negatively impacts them to the point of developing a coping mechanism.
Or at least so say the Rat Park experiments.
What? That doesn't follow at all. You want to compare the LD50 (and other effects of consumption) to the amount normally consumed, not to the LD50 of some other substance. "LD50 is 1 mg/kg" is completely meaningless if you can't consume more than 0.005 mg/kg.
If you read the Wikipedia page I’d previously linked to[1], it has this quote: “58% of e-cigarette calls to US poison control centers were related to children 5 years old or less.”
I’d personally witnessed a tragedy like this in my neighborhood many years ago, and because of that, I don’t let people come with packs of cigarettes into my house, because I’ve got a toddler.
While it is true tobacco smoke contains many carcinogens and toxins that are the likely sources of many cancers, there is evidence that nicotine itself promotes tumor growth and proliferation.
Nicotine also accelerates atherosclerosis and vascular disease.
Here's a study on Caffeine. I haven't read it all the way yet, but so far the effects are not nearly what nicotine is. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5445139/
As for sugar, that's an interesting debate. Sugar is pretty bad for you. The short answer seems to be that sugar kills more people than tobacco and nicotine and lots of other things. But sugar comes in many forms and is hard to regulate, I guess. It's a tough one for sure.
Should nicotine be _more_ regulated than that?
I generally err on the side of freedom, even if it's potentially self-harming once someone's an adult.
Would adding more law around advertising be too much? I don't think so. Labels on packaging? Sure.
Should we make it illegal altogether, or make non-bland flavors illegal, like some states have done? No. I think that's a bridge too far.
That article is a review of a bunch of cell line data and animal tests that are suggestive of "adverse effects".
It says nothing about the magnitude of the effects or actually shows data from human trials.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/vaping-smoking-heart-car...
direct link to study: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/JAHA.119.014570
"Our findings suggest that e‐cigarette use is not associated with a more favorable vascular profile..."
Are Facebook and Google employees scum of the earth for tracking user data?
Are Netflix employees scum of the earth for getting your kids addicted to TV?
Are Instagram employees scum of the earth for perpetuating impossible beauty standards?
This is insane. Juul was a company with great people working at it.
Juul does not have great people working for it, and the marketing was intentionally dishonest towards the most vulnerable in our society.
None of those other companies specifically target kids with advertising and subversive grassroots efforts to try to get them hooked on drugs.
> None of those other companies specifically target kids with advertising and subversive grassroots efforts to try to get them hooked on [their product]
I didn't intend to equate it to drugs; and, admittedly, I didn't fully read that last sentence.
Apple makes headphones that work well for listening to music and they just show you that.
All of the other company may have products that have negative aspects but none of the negative aspects are considered deliberate features of the product.
In order to quit, you need to train your body to want less nicotine, since that is the addictive part. Juul delivers the same or more nicotine as a cigarette. It is not intended to be a product to help smokers quit smoking.
An argument can be made that physically addictive substances violate a person's agency.
That is to say, it's not that many adults "like" it; it's that many adults are unable to part ways from it.
Are the substances immediately addictive? Should we violate the agency of those unaffected? What if people consent to having their agency violated?
Make no mistake, I'm not defending tobacco companies, I'm against the notion of my body's inputs being subject to someone else's control.
Edit:
> Internal documents produced to the court in Mangini v. R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, San Francisco County Superior Court No. 959516, demonstrated the industry's interest in targeting children as future smokers.[6] The importance of the youth market was illustrated in a 1974 presentation by RJR's Vice-President of Marketing who explained that the "young adult market ... represent[s] tomorrow's cigarette business. As this 14-24 age group matures, they will account for a key share of the total cigarette volume - for at least the next 25 years."[7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Camel
Anybody who thinks tobacco companies have turned over a new leaf is an idiot.
> There's not gonna be a 50 year old man who's like, "man, I should start smoking! That goddamn Camel!"
That joke always kills me :P
Kids get them from other kids, at school. This was also the main source of alcohol for kids before the drinking age was raised to 21. My mom taught high school, and noticed that fewer kids came back to school drunk after lunch after the drinking age was raised.
I love flavored juul and I'm an adult, the tobacco and menthol flavors are ass and I know a few people that have fallen back to smoking or chewing tobacco when they could no longer get their mango juul pods.
In this case, it is distracting from the fact that, compared to smoking, the harm from vaping is so ridiculously tiny as to be deemed “harmless” on that scale.
Smoking kills half of its users (seven million smokers a year dead), and additionally kills OVER A MILLION non-users each and every year from proximity to smokers.
Your hate is misplaced. This is the pinnacle of whataboutism.
Vaping is a huge net benefit to society.
There is no doubt that Juul is safer than a pack of cigarettes. But Juul can't make it as a start up selling to only smokers who want to reduce their risk of death, as has been seen by their sales numbers. They are actively marketing to groups of people who are in zero current harm from first hand nicotine. And nicotine does harm those people. Here's a peer reviewed article just to make the point.
(In some ways it’s like people trying to ban rifles that cause ~700 deaths per year in the US while small caliber handguns cause >11k.)
Salty fried foods are a bigger public health issue right now than if every nonsmoker took up vaping.
The other examples you have are a false equivalence. We can certainly say that nicotine sellers have an obligation to explain the effects of their products and also say that there are bigger public health issues right now. I certainly would not imply that nicotine is the largest public health issue right now. But we can deal with so many things at once.
They have helped a ton of adults quit or reduce smoking, which is great, but they have also explicitly targeted kids via presentations in classrooms, paid underage Instagram influencers and lots more. There is no requirement to excuse the second because of the first.