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a lot of people DON'T trade options on their expiration day. Even marketmakers, whose job is to provide liquidity in the name often shy away from it or demand high premia.

historically, retail investors sometimes closed out their positions on expiration day instead of exercising. this might sound weird, but some people have weird portfolio restrictions so its occasionally sensible.

also, for some equities, there are big events that happen to coincide with expirations. If you have an opinion on a big event (lets say AAPL options are expiring and you think there's going to be a huge announcement), it lets you buy expiring options for virtually no volatility premium.

also: people like gambling. buying cheapie out-of-the-money options is kind of like buying a lottery ticket. I've seen them hit (saw a guy take home a 5million dollar win one wednesday morning for a $6k lottery ticket he bought on the close on tuesday)

As other comments have noted, there are already exhaustive guides on the subject and they are very good. I think the key would be to have a very different approach to it specifically, teach intuitions, not technical details.

Former options guy myself and was thinking about doing some similar writeups on options pricing.

i like the graphs of you drew of the strips with different times to expiraiton. One thing that is generally counterintuitive for people is how there is translation of the graph on the x axis over time (theta and carry rates).

also generally, I think introducing black scholes is good, but doesn't really "stick" for most people for a while. it takes a while to develop an intuition about the components of "C = SN(d1) - KN(d2)" means.

I think teaching these intuitions would really sit well for the HN crowd. Also explaining option pricing as the value of the cash flows of the hedge portfolio with constant or regular hedging (like physics, start with assumptions like GBM, zero transaction cost, no bid-ask spread -- then if you ever feel like it later, address how hedge strategies can dramatically change option pricing). Natenberg does a simplied version of this.

Also, Cox Ross Rubenstein is a great way to teach euro AND american options -- just change the rules at each node to get different rules and you can demonstate convergence to Black Scholes with the right parameters.

To me, the original post came across as encouragement to all the founders who feel like they are the only ones busting their butts and still feel stuck.

I felt this particular excerpt from your blog post though was a bit unfair to Suster:

> Suster (who’s a VC now) won’t take his own advice though, because:

> > Of course I do [want to be a founder again]! How could you not want to go back to it. It’s addicting. It’s an adrenaline rush like no other.

because in his post, he also says:

> Yet one day you wake up and you realize you can’t run as fast as the young guys. You can’t quite hit the 3-pointers as often. Yes, you have maturity that makes you a wiser player. But you realize that you can be more helpful as a coach.

And yes, I sleep better at night as a coach. And I’m happy as a VC.

"His advice" isn't for everyone to be a founder. I think it was just a pep talk, like: "If you feel like you're spinning your wheels going nowhere and everyone else is a rock star, don't worry, you're not alone. That's how everyone does it."

I don't know Mark or anyone he has invested in, nor am I particularly tied to him. However, it felt a little strong when you issued this warning:

> be careful around VCs like Suster, who’d love to give you heaps of money so you can get up at 4:50am and get a heart attack every time your money starts to run out.

Keep writing. I like your style and I think its great when people write. Just leaving my honest feedback as well because I felt some of the aggression was unwarranted.

it boggles my mind that people presume ignorance on the part of the actor (as referenced in the blog that "everybody else is doing it wrong").

its a deliberate play against my current income that i will report and its not actually a strict withdrawal. 40k and 10% early fee were strictly an example. that's not actually what's going on in my case, but its a lot more digestable and the vanilla case and I'd do it even if that was my situation (I'm doing better than that).

i was a financial professional and think about that sort of stuff.

Love this answer.

For every successful startup that has ran their bank account down to $100, maxed out their credit cards, had trouble fundraising, etc., dozens (hundreds?) more have done the same but ended up in the deadpool.

For me it highlights the insanity of our pursuit. Not only do founders struggle, experience the trough of sorrow, and often not emerge... there are often not even any indicators that things are going to turn around. The feedback you get from being $100 away from failure and $100 away from almost turning around and being huge might often be the same.

It's like fate's deliberate and cruel punishment to those who have elected the startup path, telling you that you can't quit, no matter how bleak it feels, because, well ... you don't even have a way to know if it IS bleak.

It's not over til it's over.

I am fine with "Ethics != Morals".

However your explanations seem suspect:

1. I disagree entirely with the comments "ethical/unethical pretty much always refers to a relationship" and "ethics are about relationships"

2. "Some things that are clearly immoral in one value system or another are clearly NOT unethical in any system of ethics." -- This confuses me. Can you give me an example of an act that is CLEARLY IMMORAL in one value system and also CLEARLY NOT UNETHICAL in ANY SYSTEM OF ETHICS

From one of your links "According to Dictionary.com, ethics is a system of moral principles, while morals are principles of right and wrong conduct."

this is the sort of discussion that can rapidly devolve into something less interesting than the story of virool's hustle. i don't think anyone will dispute that the behavior was aggressive, questionable, possibly unprofessional.

i don't have a strong position on whether it's ethical or not, but i still dig the hustle.

i won't dwell, since i think it detracts from the real story here.

i tend to like aggressive moves by startups. i also thought wepay freezing cash i huge ice blocks and dumping it at a paypal meet was pretty clever.

sometimes startups do unprofessional things. they're certainly not always justifiable, and things would become a shitshow really fast if everyone did them all the time, but i can't help but smile when i see occasional transgressions when the person who is hurt is Goliath.

i find that people use the word "unethical" very liberally. its not clear to me how there is a moral brightline here.

fortune favors the bold.

(edit: before everybody thinks i'm just an unethical kind of guy... i definitely believe in morals, i just don't think this is a clearly immoral action. also, i generally favor aggressive marketing tactics for early stage startups. I think it's one of the advantages startups have over established players.)

@dantillberg, @jcr, et al: you're right.

i heard about the original study, was curious, but not enough to think much of it. in a previous startup we had a female intern who was getting substantially better response rates than the male founders.

after the recent press about how women in senior roles correlates with startup success i became a bit more curious and wondered if i could craft the perfect "from" field for outgoing emails.

i admit this was aggressive and that I got carried away. that's no excuse.

citing an absolute difference isn't very useful when you're talking about differences in conversion rates.

    * 0.6% -> 1.2% is a 0.6% bump.
    * 49.4% -> 50.0% is a 0.6% bump.

it sounds like you're saying that if someone increases their landing page conversion rate by 1% (from 1%) you'd rather hear that the conversion rate increased by a point.

the business owner is probably more interested in the fact that their revenues doubled.

This is a fantastic idea, not only for Twice to acquire, but big incubators and vc funds to acquire talent for their portfolio companies.

As I understand it, the conflict is that essentially this: Person A has adopted a word to mean a certain static thing. Person B interprets that word differently (or persons B-Z).

Person A is entitled to feel it is ridiculous, sure.

Person B is equally entitled to feel ownership of that word, unless you think that Person A's prior self-identification with that word or longer history of usage is sufficient to warrant some sort of authority over its common usage.

Would you understand why someone who self identifies as a geek might be offended if you were adamant that they didn't "embody geek culture"?

Words mean different things to different people. People got worked up over pg's supposedly narrow interpretation of the word "startup" in "Startup=Growth".

Do what you do.

i'm sorry you're upset that a word that is personal to you because you feel it symbolizes an era when you were persecuted for your adolescent social awkwardness is being adopted by the mainstream to be somewhat "cool".

Society's view of "cool" changes occasionally. Fat girls were once the hot girls, it was once cool to be sexist and racist, and bellbottoms and mullets were once awesome (ok, mullets are still awesome).

i understand that you feel that an identity that is personal to you is being encroached upon, and maybe even feel like it dilutes your identity. but words, and meanings, and sentiments change.

i've never played dungeons and dragons or world of warcraft, and your article makes it sound like that makes me not a geek.

I definitely consider myself a geek and it sounds like you think that self identification "disrespects anyone who really did get hassled for being a geek". I write code, nerd out about brain teasers, think about math problems, but yeah, I also like Corona and miniskirts (you know, at least looking at them on reddit, because that's the closest I'll ever get to a miniskirt).

Your narrow definition of "geek" is just as "disrespectful" and alienating as the societally evolved broad one that you're offended by.

Language and social norms change. Accept it.

i'll admit i still read these with the hope of some magic silver bullet that gets rocket lease on track for exponential growth, but i haven't found it yet and i have nothing but respect for the founders that have it in them to relentlessly do PR and write blogs.

"paying" 3% of your company leaves you with 97%. Trying to drive your remaining 97% in the ground is idiocy.

The idea isn't to say "everyone should throw X%" into a pool. It's for you to pick a number that makes sense for you and find a group of founders that wants something similar.

Founders who are absolutely certain of their future success only do worse by pooling equity. The more likely you are to succeed and succeed big, the less likely you should be to contribute to a pool.

Luckily, founders run the gamut in both skill and risk tolerance, so there are probably people close to you no matter where you fall on the spectrum.

the idea would be to give up a VERY small sliver of your upside in hopes of participating on other wins.

I understand founders' desire to "maximize their upside potential", but if you cash out for 100mm, the incremental 5mm you give up has relatively small utility after the 95mm you cashed out.

However, in the more probably 0 dollar scenario, the shavings of the successful startups will be a nice hedge. Probably won't pay your bills, but better than zero.

Hopefully you pool with a group of founders that increases your expected utility (not dollars).

I generally just look at changes in my google analytics numbers rather than absolute values to see if I'm doing better or worse.

Admittedly not the most sophisticated GA approach.

6 invitations != 6 conversions, but yes, I'd agree that 25/conversion would be pretty reasonable. I haven't done recent metrics on what my customer LTV is, but its at least in the ballpark of 25.

I entirely agree that this needs some split testing -- I didn't explore the reddit advertising tools enough to see if there's an easy way to split test, but it didn't jump out at me.

if i'm clear, you are saying, "the backend dev won't build the right thing if they don't don't a good UI person to guide WHAT to build".

Exactly ZERO startups that require _A_ backend to be built have succeeded with the right idea of what to build but no backend.

MORE THAN ZERO startups have succeeded by buildilng backends without consulting, often building the wrong thing first, or getting lucky, or with users that accept a SUBOPTIMAL (but better than status quo) experience.

In a perfect world you get infinite resources.

Obviously I'm painting this a clear either-or dichotomy, which its not, but the point is that sometimes, due to other constraints, an entrepreneur might have to make the call.

It doesn't make him a crappy entereprenur. Please understand that when you think "I won't work with him because he doesn't prioritize UX".