Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

PaulDavisThe1st

I left amzn after 1 year of my options vested. Compared to almost all Americans, it made me rich. It let me spend 10 years as an at-home parent raising my daughter. Had I stayed the full term, I'd have owned 1% of the company (I got ripped off in my initial negotiations with Jeff :).

Occasionally I wonder what I'd have done with all that money, but very rarely. I don't miss the billions. The $1M (plus or minus) that I got out of it was more than enough to count myself deeply fortunate. Nobody "earns" that much money - I just got lucky.

I prefer the path I took - a great life, much happiness, low stress, and for the last 20 years, the fun and games of building one of the most successful libre software projects around.

Would you be keen to come on my podcast (https://www.raddadshow.com) to talk about this? IMO buying 10 years of freedom with 12 months of work is a pretty good deal! Many people that have money end up with less. It would be fun to explore your life, and maybe inspire future generations to reconfigure priorities.

I'm glad you found happiness and out of the rat race. how did you get ripped off?

I had no idea what percentage to ask for. I asked a few friends who had been in startups, and that convinced me that the 1% I was being offered (over 5 years) was a good deal. What I didn't realize till about a year later was that my friends had all joined their respective companies as, say, employee #20 or #30. I was coming into a company with zero employees, and it turns out that I should have been pushing for on the order of 5x was I was being offered.

OTOH, I did tell Jeff that I was having a daughter in several months and planned to go to a 3 day week after that happened. He agreed to that ("I knew when I met you that you'd think about work 24/7 anyway"), so there was a tradeoff there.

I'm not really complaining, but when I did find out what some other early hires had negotiated, it stuck in my throat for a bit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com