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Comment by akavi | Hacker News Reader

Huh, a lot of this doesn't ring true to me, as someone who's negotiated comp at 6 (mostly YC backed) startups over the past 5 years.

In my experience, 10 year expiration dates for options and reasonably detailed financials (at the very least, ARR, ARR growth rate, churn rate) have been table stakes. And most companies were happy to let me view their latest round's pitch deck, after signing an NDA.

It's frustrating that almost no company offers early exercise rights, given how significant a tax value that it can represent, but compared to most other industries, it does seem tech is particularly employee friendly.

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It's fascinating because the 2 YC backed startups I worked for both offered early exercise. Not saying you are wrong, In my n = 2 experience, I thought it was in the "YC Playbook".

> And most companies were happy to let me view their latest round's pitch deck, after signing an NDA.

If potential investors are seeing that deck without an NDA, why should you sign one?

The real answer, of course, is social class. Marx was right. Investors are the bourgeoisie, and you're a proletarian whose survival needs are an exploitable resource. They don't follow the rules you do. Investors are like Ancient Greek gods (or Ancient Greek something else) to founders, and you and I are shit to these people, and the moment you stop making excuses for their behavior and see it as it really is, it all makes sense.

What even Marx didn't foresee was the effectiveness with which managerial bureaucrats (who might have been considered upper proletarian in the 1800s) would take the system over for their own purposes and merge into--and, arguably, become--the real elite... the same thing that happened in certain failed socialist experiments.

It’s less class and a matter of who needs whom. Tell an investor to sign and NDA and he says pass. An employee or potential employee doesn’t have the bargaining chips.

So then it's exactly class. The number of bargaining chips you have is approximately the number you are born with. Sure, there's some Brownian motion, but it's basically insubstantial except for lottery winners and lightning victims.

If you're born into connections, you make more connections. If you're stuck having to work to survive, you get assigned more drudgery and never advance. It's the same shitty system that's been around for thousands of years.

I think you're confusing social class with Marx's proletariat (working class) vs bourgeoisie (capitalists).

Your bargaining chips are determined by supply and demand. If you have stuff - money, knowledge, skill, power by virtue of organizational position - you have leverage. If you don't, you don't. Eliminating social class doesn't change this much.

Your analysis is wrong.

The people with connections and serious money do not meaningfully compete against their own class (at least, they ensure that their intra-group competition does not benefit anyone outside their group). The people with skills, knowledge, and work ethic have to compete against the whole world.

It is not a symmetric or fair exchange.

You're making a broad comparison between the Marxian classes.

But within capitalists there is also always the noveau riche and the old money.

You have to be self aware of that dynamic. Because playing off old money vs noveau riche is as essential tool of the proletariat.

Your bargaining chips in terms of valueable knowledge and skills are still low class. You're still bargaining for your meal and shelter.

if you have skill and knowledge that others don't, but others need, then you can bargain for your meals and shelter very efficiently - so much so that there would be left over money.

That’s literally a class divide

It's power derived from supply and demand, not class. It's possible for you to have knowledge and skills that give you power, rather than just some money.

This is like basic type theory man. It’s two classes.

"Social class" is not the same as a class in a classifier. The plumber may have a lot of bargaining power when an ice-storm breaks all the pipes in a major city, but the plumber does not have a high social class. Typically high social class also has a fair amount of bargaining power, due to frequently having capital (usually politically or financially), but not always.

The fact that the social classes here happen to line up with political power does not change the fact that there are two social classes being treated differently as well. There are other posters in this comment section talking about how even when the engineers are domain experts that are needed by the business, there is a knee jerk reaction to deny requests for this sort of information when it is expected to be handed over to the investor class.

If these weren't social classes then you wouldn't see resistance to changing the formula in the face of market pressures and you would see easy movement between investors and engineers instead of them being gatekept along connections and rituals.

Because employees that you interview are different from investors.

At a minimum, you are going to interview a lot more engineers that are tempted to divulge trade secrets than investors.

Potential investors aren't shown trade secrets because anything that you show without an NDA ceases to be a trade secret. "No NDA" disclosure can also block patent protection.

There's a huge difference between pitching and due diligence.

Also, it's reasonably common to show a pitch deck to 100+ potential investors. How many series A companies interview 20 engineers, let alone 100?

I agree - it has become far more common the last 5 or so years for startups to open their books to new hires. I’ve seen quite a few places even breaking out the expected return at different valuations and dilutions after further funding rounds.

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