jsherry

Truly excellent summary. Thank you.

Question 1: In the case of exercising and ISO, you said that the spread amount is includable in income for purposes of calculating AMT. How is this spread determined? Is this where the company's 409a comes into play?

Question 2: This may be hard to answer, but generally speaking, if you're part of a company that you believe in, would you typically advise an employees to exercise his/her ISOs as soon as they vest in an effort to become eligible for LTCG in the long run? Or would you typically advise an employee to wait in order to avoid AMT issues? Again, this is likely case by base, but curious to get your thoughts.

Thanks again.

From my understanding (disclaimer: I'm neither a lawyer nor an accountant, but I have been thoroughly advised by both on the topic), there is an important distinction between ISOs (Incentive Stock Options) and NSOs (Nonqualified Stock Options) when it comes to tax implications for the employee.

First, ISOs are not taxed at the time of grant or exercise. Instead, they are taxed when the stock is sold. NSOs, on the other hand, are taxed immediately upon exercise on the difference in value between the fair market value of the stock and your exercise price.

Second, ISOs are eligible for long-term capital gains treatment so long as the employee holds the stock for at least two years before selling. NSOs are always taxed as income.

From the employer perspective, there are implications as well, but I'm less versed on that side of things. It has something to do with tax deductions for the business when issuing NSOs that are not received when issuing ISOs.

For more info on this topic, here are a couple of links, but I'd of course recommend talking to a lawyer or accountant if you're serious about the topic:

http://www.naffziger.net/blog/2007/03/31/startup-stock-optio...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-qualified_stock_option

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incentive_stock_option

New York, New York

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Another issue that needs to be considered for this initiative to meet its goal (which I assume is to install a professional engineering/applied sciences base in NYC) is where these people will work once they receive their educations. Tech is on the rise in NYC, no doubt, but it's too soon to call it a long-term trend. Fin Services will continue to consume the majority of the talent for the distant, yet foreseeable future. Academia alone won't make this goal a reality.

Perhaps just as interesting as the article itself are the comments.

http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/0...

It's interesting to hear the varied opinions from residents of NYC, some of who are angry about public dollars going toward a private institution while the public schools in NYC struggle. Also interesting are the varied opinions on competition in NYC: some love it, while some wish the money went towards the incumbents such as Columbia, etc. Personally, I think that the competition could help raise everybody's game in Applied Sciences area in NYC - at least that's the hope.

Definitely agree on that as well - it's a pros and cons argument. Frankly I miss the scoring for the reason you mention, but I think this method promotes merit. Of course, now we are all subjected to whatever secret algorithm pushes comments to the top of the page, but I'll naively trust that it's doing its job properly ;-)

Hidden comment scores help us avoid groupthink.

I still think that the number one threat to professional journalists is the low barrier to entry for people to get into journalism these days, not robots. That said, this is really interesting and will likely play a role in generating content from structured data (like baseball stats) at some point in the relatively near future.

Technically, you don't even need a degree in anything relevant to nutrition to call yourself a nutritionist. Dietitian on the other hand comes with more accreditation. For that reason, dietitians often refer to themselves as dietitians rather than nutritionists because it's more distinguished. I err towards suspicion when someone refers to himself/herself as simply a "nutritionist".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutritionist

Very cool. Might be interesting to collect age, years of experience and perhaps company while you're at it so you can see a nice distribution. This might destroy some anonymity amongst a close group of friends, but amongst a diverse anonymous crowd such as HN it would be interesting.

I think that calling Gladwell's suggestion that 10,000 hours is the magic number to become an expert bogus based on your single data point is a bit hasty. Gladwell didn't say that everybody who puts in 10,000 hours of band lessons becomes the Beatles. The way I interpreted the book was that the 10,000 hours of practice was simply a prerequisite to becoming the Beatles. There were numerous other factors outside of this practice time requirement that lifted the Beatles to fame. Many of those factors were luck-driven, including but not limited to inherent talent that they were born with.

In fact, my interpretation of Outliers was that being good is simply a prerequisite - the rest is heavily luck-driven even though nobody really likes to talk about it.

Just imagine where they'd be today if only Cuil had the foresight to buy cool.com instead...

I'd add Babies R Us and buybuy Baby logos to the site. Granted you say it works for all online retailers, those are 2 huge ones that together prob own a good % of the market.

The reason you can't in contact with people at Google is because you're not the customer. Paying businesses are the customers. Not just trying to sound snarky - it's true.

Instead of taking time off to do this, I'm doing it on the fly while my startup is up and running. I fought this fight for just about 2 years, outsourcing much of our web development during that time. And I don't regret outsourcing - it can get you up and running faster than learning, especially if you're building something that borders on complex. But in the end, we really needed to start bringing things in-house, from both the standpoints of protecting our IP as well as enabling us to become more nimble in terms of making changes on the fly etc.

We haven't completely weened off outsourced web development, but I can now see a path to get there, and it all started by learning how to become more self-sufficient.

Arrington's timing on breaking angelgate was impeccable - likely sweetened, or at least helped seal the deal at the 11th hour.

An interesting and seemingly revealing article no doubt. I "choose" to buy it depicts Arrington's life genuinely.

That said, a couple weeks ago, Arrington wrote a piece on TC regarding the "psychomanipulative" techniques he uses when he writes to get the reaction he wants from his readers. Here's the link: http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/05/blogging-and-mass-psychoman... but if you don't feel like clicking here is an excerpt:

"But then you start to get really good at what you do. You write something and you get trashed. The next time you try it a little differently and it the commenters love you. You don’t even do it consciously – but over the years you just get better at it. To the point where you pretty much know exactly what the reaction will be to any given post, and how to tweak things to get the reaction you want."

Anyway, based on this, I'm left with a slight bit of skepticism after reading the Inc article. Is this the real Arrington, or simply the Arrington he wants us to believe? I'm not sure there are motives for the latter, which is why I choose to believe that the Inc article depicts his life genuinely, but not without some doubt.

Just food for thought.