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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

So founders do treat some of their investors like this - look at every ICO, and a lot of dumb overseas money, and a good number of friends/family/fools rounds. And conversely, there are some employees that they treat with kid gloves, who basically get the investor treatment. Look at executive hires.

The difference is basically two letters: "No". Most institutional investors have the ability and inclination to say no to a deal. Many executives - or even high-level FAANG engineers - have the ability and inclination to say no to a deal. Your average engineer a couple years out of college does not, or if they do, they don't understand the power of declining a job offer. Start your negotiations with "no". Be curious and open to opportunities, and show a lot of enthusiasm during the interview process, but whenever you feel you're treated unfairly, walk away. People will stop treating you unfairly.

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The problem is that some people need money and can't say no. That's why anybody works for minimum wage...

The executives and investors and FAANG engineers have all made good money and seen decent RSU terms, you can't pull the wool over their eyes. Someone who is just getting into tech may be allured by a 50k salary and "1 MILLION OPTIONS!!!!" (There are ten trillion in the option pool).

I think engineers would do well to know that you are a COST CENTER to the business and the people who run it. They need you to make their product so they can make money but they hire you begrudgingly. You are in their power and they want to take advantage of you by paying you the least they can (shady options awards) and working you as much as possible (why did you slip on this feature you story pointed!!!).

Put yourselves in their shoes and you would do the same. Starting a successful business is all about customer growth and making money. If you aren't directly responsible for a part of that then you are a cost. Make sure you are getting paid what you are worth because nothing in this world gets built without great engineers, but the system is run by people who want to have power over you. Be careful.

> The problem is that some people need money and can't say no.

If they need money, and this is the best offer they got, then what's the problem with accepting it? They are still better off than not accepting it.

No problem with that. The problem I have is with selling people bullshit golden promises of wealth when that is mathematically impossible given the cap table. Just don't even offer equity at all at that point so employees aren't deluded.

At this point I know what I'm doing enough to not get burnt by these types of scams, and when I was an engineer I was lucky to basically work for FAANGs the whole time where they are very charitable to employees. But when I was 23 I didn't have the knowledge to evaluate pre-ipo equity and some startups prey on this information imbalance to delude people.

Of course there's no issue with that. I think the point is to know your options and worth.

If you have a low offer but no other options that's "fair" in a sense. If you can get something it'd be pretty silly to accept a bad deal, however.

The problem is that evaluating whether or not this is the "best" offer depends in great measure on how one values the options one is getting. And many founders are all sunshine and roses about that--just as the article portrays.

Nothing wrong with taking your best offer. Everything wrong with misleading potential employees about what the offer means.

> Someone who is just getting into tech may be allured by a 50k salary and "1 MILLION OPTIONS!!!!"

This reminds me of a job offer from a startup I interviewed with that offered me a specific number of options, but wouldn't tell me anything that I could use to value them, effectively forcing me to value them at $0.

You should always value options at $0 even if they do give you information. Take the probability that the company won't go under, multiplied by how much you'll lose in further dilution rounds, multiplied by the likelihood that you'll get screwed by some other kind of dirty-dealing, and startup equity almost always comes out to be worthless. Work at one anyway if you want the experience, but never kid yourself that your options will amount to anything.

The real way to get rich by working at a startup is to advance your career while there - Gain experience and title increases at a startup, where such experience and title increases are easy to get because of the relative lack of competition. Iff you startup makes it big, ask for commensurate raises. Otherwise, leverage that experience into working for a larger company that will pay more.

>You should always value options at $0 even if they do give you information.

If the company has meaningful revenue and a solid margin AND they have already paid out to employees in previous liquidity events, it's pretty likely the options have value above zero.

If that is the case, you're not working at a startup. You're working at a actual, real, proven business.

I've seen startups willingly train their new employees to think about equity in broken or meaningless terms. Early in my career I sat through a discussion of equity with a VP of engineering where they explained that our options would always be priced ~$4 on acquisition and $12 on IPO. The finance people would always just make it work that way regardless of the number of options in the pool and the total valuation.

I also once joined a company to be told 3 months in that the board was not approving any new-hire grants as the valuation/appraisal work had expired - and that it wasn't reasonable for me to ask them to pay 90k just to approve the options they had granted.

At this point in my career having worked in FAANG, I wouldn't value private equity at all unless I could take 20-50% of the company. It's not even a lottery ticket anymore, and has just become a way for executives to exploit information asymmetry.

I'd be curious if any startups have explored venture debt arrangements with employees to guarantee that they receive meaningful deferred compensation. Or if there are other mechanisms to publicly show that the equity is meaningful in most successful outcomes.

yup. we went through a down round at a previous company. if i were to exercise my options, I'd be immediately down 50%. some "incentive."

> I think engineers would do well to know that you are a COST CENTER to the business and the people who run it. They need you to make their product so they can make money but they hire you begrudgingly.

I don't agree. Engineers are sometimes a cost center, but they can also be a profit center. You can help revenue by decreasing expenses by automating something or noticing how the business is wasting money w/r/t tech and taking steps to help fix that.

You can also help revenue by increasing sales by building something, internal or external, that can either be sold or help sales.

But your larger point is correct. When you are starting at a company, know how your efforts are connected to revenue and sales. If your interviewer can't answer how they will be, find someone who can.

I wrote a bit more about understanding the business here: https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2018/10/12/understand-the...

> You can help revenue by decreasing expenses by automating something or noticing how the business is wasting money w/r/t tech and taking steps to help fix that

I once worked with a process engineer who, a few months after being hired, had identified a number of manual processes as low hanging fruit that could be easily automated. He presented his findings to upper management, argued that they should let him build out a team to automate these processes, and that they could fund it with the headcount he's able to reduce. Management gave him the green light, adjusted his budget each quarter based on how much money he had saved the company over the previous quarter, and over a few years he was immensely successful.

You'll be treated as a cost center so long as you let other people think of you as a cost center, but if you can frame your contributions in a way that makes your value proposition obvious, it's possible to be treated differently while doing largely the same work.

> You'll be treated as a cost center so long as you let other people think of you as a cost center, but if you can frame your contributions in a way that makes your value proposition obvious, it's possible to be treated differently while doing largely the same work.

So true! I have to drop this link, as it does a much better job than any number of comments at explaining this: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...

I can’t remember where I read this essay but it went along the lines of: no one is really interested in reducing costs, they’d much rather increase revenue, the reason being that the larger your budget the more important you are on the totem pole and reducing your (already approved) expenses doesn’t make your budget larger.

Engineers consume capital that was raised to produce highly valuable products that create enterprise value that justify the capital that was raised. Those who call engineers as cost centers in today's world are doomed because they don't understand what's the most value creating activity in their value chain.

I think you’ve got cause and effect a bit backwards.

> whenever you feel you’re treated unfairly, walk away. People will stop treating you unfairly.

Walking away from a bad deal certainly prevents you from being taken advantage of in that moment, but it will do nothing to prevent the next company who knows nothing about you from trying to hoodwink you again. While the ability to say no to a bum deal is important, it’s no substitute for actual leverage in these situations.

Executives and highly valued FAANG engineers have more leverage not because they say “no”, they have more leverage because both parties know they can say no, and they’re valued enough for that no to hurt. The startup needs not just an engineer, but that specific one. The threat of a “no” those with leverage gets far more results than from someone without it.

> but it will do nothing to prevent the next company who knows nothing about you from trying to hoodwink you again

But what it does means is you won't leave until you get a good deal. And when's the last time someone left a good deal for a bad one?

People leave for worse deals all the time, usually due to information imbalances or downright fraud.

Knowing your BATNA is critical for negotiating anything, including employment.

One of the best ways to accomplish this is to avoid shopping for a job when you’re unhappy with the one you have; when your best alternative is “I keep working at the place I like with the people I’m on good terms with” it’s far easier to start from that no and let yourself be convinced.

You can always bluff. I don’t think people do this enough! I mean a shit job is still a BATNA, and you simply don’t tell the next guy you hate the job. Which is as good as you loving your job and “just dipping my toe in the market” from a negotiation point of view.

I don't believe he's talking about the employer, he's discussing the emotional well-being a job seeker would need. If the job seeker hates their own job, they're more likely to jump from one bad situation to another bad situation.

But you're right, and I've done that myself. Where I hated a job so badly and just pretended and smiled as much I could until someone hired me out of that situation.

Oh yeah I’ve been in this boat of jumping from bad to bad. That is probably what sparked my comment. Something about experience being the best education also the most expensive!

The problem is i didn’t realise there is really no way to tell what a job wi be like until you’ve done it for 1-2 years! Therefore if you think “oh i really want to work for them because they are offering a good job” that’s the weakness I had - in reality you can’t put stock into how good you think it will be. They are trying to sell you on working there after all. By not putting stock into it “ah this is a another job I’ll do my best work but it may turn out shit might be good” then you can emotionally walk away from their offer more easily, and ask for caveats. “Can I move teams if I decide I don’t enjoy the first team after 6 months” and stuff like that could be negotiated before starting. Oh and get it in writing I’ve been burned by verbal “miscommunications” before.

And finally I’m going to say “Haskell Tax” is a thing and similar dynamic plays here. They might be the only shop in town offering a Haskell job but if you make it look like you have other options “I applied for a blockchain job too. It’s c++ and Scala not Haskell but the tech looks really cool” then you don’t appear to need them as much.

> They might be the only shop in town offering a Haskell job

I learned this the hard way: Do not let the technology stack be the deciding factor in which job you take.

Skipping the Cobol job is reasonable. Picking the only Haskell job because it is the only Haskell job isn't.

> BATNA

Best alternative to a negotiated agreement [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...

> avoid shopping for a job when you’re unhappy with the one you have.

The problem with this is that bad jobs don't often turn into good jobs, so job hunting under those circumstances is usually the best option. I do agree that it's worthwhile to actively look for other jobs even when you're happy with your current one.

ICOs aren’t investments, they are consumer products, sold into a hot consumer market where the consumers want to flip them. But where the consumers don’t actually know they are consumers.

This isn’t semantics, token sales are counted for as revenue.

Yes, its too bad that there is a colloquial action called “invest” and a legal term called “investor”

> This isn’t semantics, token sales are counted for as revenue.

This is obvious when you think about it for a second, but also - lol. ICOs created a capital structure level that's completely outside of the capital structure :)

Yeah its pretty marvelous when you look at a quadrant chart of scalable things you can sell, tokens are better than drugs.

That’s pretty unprecedented.

They are even more weightless, more fungible, cheaper to produce than both legal and illegal drugs and you can pay people from your illiquid premine and deduct that against your liquid revenue. Primarily because people are willing to be paid in the tokens (unlike other consumer products or even shares), and because they aren't illegal like drugs.

Due to their “property” designation and again non-illicit status, donations to non-profits are extremely flexible too, for greater tax benefits at cost-basis or fair market value.

People should look into making them better instead of looking at what went wrong.

In these situations, I think it's meaningful to differentiate between "investors" and "speculators".

People should look at the business model as normal privately held companies:

When the consumer market is hot, sell more product.

When the share market is hot, sell more shares.

When the credit market is hot, sell more debt.

Token issuers currently make enough to just stick with the consumer market, but make too little subsequent revenue relative to their primary sale to access the equity and corporate bond market. This can be fixed by a continual stream of token sales for different products, currently the consumers that think they playing arm-chair angel investor dont want to see this industrialized because they think the teams should be married to the “vision” they “invested” in, and liberally call any predictable deviation from that outcome an “exit scam”. But token factories will happen and already exist, and will be taught in Harvard Business School later this decade.

In the token market, this is currently controversial because consumers themselves dont know what they are.

Outside the token market, this is currently controversial because “ICO” “blockchain” are bad words and there also is a general ignorance perpetuated by misrepresented exposure to things going wrong, combined with the same consumer-investor misalignment when those people do “invest” in something. It doesn't really matter, the market can bear what the market can bear.

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