Hacker News Reader

Comment by Temporary_31337 | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone point me to how much the guy had actually earned? I feel that if he’d stayed in the US and earned Microsoft stock options he’d be much better off financially

View on HN

The latest news I can find shows the company he founded was planning to IPO at a valuation of $2.5billion. If one were to assume the founder owns 10% of the company (reasonable at IPO based on what I know), he would have made about $250 million in equity. [https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/snapdeal...]

This is in addition to about $650k annual salary in India. [https://www.zeebiz.com/companies/news-snapdeal-co-founders-k...]

This would be pretty much impossible even with a very successful career at Microsoft, short of becoming an SVP or the CEO.

Also, one can potentially do more with a given amount of dollars in India than in the US, because things tend to be cheaper in India.

But, with the amount of money involved in this particular case I don't think any of that matters.

Absolutely impossible that MS stock options as a Software Engineer in 2007 gave you $200m plus today.

There is more to life than chasing TC.

Err, even disregarding the fact that there's more to life than the money you earn, staying in the US wasn't even an option for him.

Is that all that matters to people these days?

No but if we want to quantify whether a decision was a net win or not, a valid approach is to express it in monetary terms. There are other approaches, some more objective some less, but money is simple.

E.g. if I worked at MS and over 10 years built a capital of $1mln, vs having worked in India and built a capital of $300k, there may be other considerations, but in purely monetary terms the MS approach would’ve been much better. Further compound interest will make the $1mln wealth run away much faster than $300k.

Except that $300k in India gets you farther than $1M in the US.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com