Thanks for the heads up about the whitelist feature. I would also like to be able to record all my activity locally and not send anything to the server. It would make RescueTime more useful and eliminate my privacy concerns.
Try to avoid extraneous sites (and email and IM, if possible) until you've gotten something done. I.e. don't start your day off with surfing and email. If you are bored by your work it is too easy to not get started and just continue reading stuff online. The effect of this is that by the time you get around to doing work, your brain is totally scrambled by all the stuff you just piped into it - making it even harder to finish the boring stuff you need to do, and more tempting to just return to the distractions.
At least that is how it is for me. I've found that if I have boring work stuff to do, the ONLY way I can get it done in any sort of reasonable time frame is to just immediately dive into it and barrel through it as soon as I wake up. (actually after I wake up and do a bit of exercise)
Of course any super rich and successful person will tell you the real way to solve the boring work problem is to convince someone else to do it for you, so you can spend more time keeping up on things. :)
In this kind of forum that encourages entrepreneurship even in the face of stiff competition I'm surprised that many people dismiss the notion that someone could make a better seed funding organization than YC.
There are many successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere who would be great startup advisors and inspiration leaders. If they decided to start YC clones I don't see why they couldn't attract great talent. They may even be more successful than YC at generating high returns on their investment. Luck plays a huge factor in startup success, after all...
By my experience (I've gotten job offers from a few startups), most startups (especially after their series A) offer employees (at least engineers) a miniscule amount of equity (a small fraction of a percent). Even if these companies would have great exits (tens of millions), their engineers would hardly get enough for a down payment on a house in the Bay Area.
Summary: don't expect the equity you get from working at a startup (unless you're a VP or an executive) to be worth much. Google-like events where many employees got rich are few and far between. If you do work for an existing company, I suggest looking at salary more than equity as a means of making money. The difference between making 120k vs 80k over 4 years is 160k -- more than you're likely to get from options, and less risky.
Is Giles saying that with the help of Rubinius you can do Lisp-style code generation in Ruby? I don't know much about Rubinius but this doesn't sound right. Lisp macros let you manipulate the program's AST in compile time very easily because the AST is made of sexp's, just like the program code itself. This is due to the peculiar Lisp syntax. Lisp code generation seems quite different from the monkey patching techniques demonstrated in the presentation. Am I missing something?
I didn't take that to be his main point, but yes, I think so. Though I think it would be more accurate to say "Lisp lets you manipulate the program's AST trivially because the AST is the code".
This is basically Greenspun's 10th Law again. There's no magic in Lisp that's computationally impossible in another language, but it might be simpler to just write a Lisp in that language first. Rubinius did something even tougher: they wrote a Ruby. The advantage of this is that it's backwards-compatible with all their existing code, while upgrading to sexps would not be.
I think the monkeypatching corresponds to only the front half of Lisp macros. The macroexpand part comes from making the monkeypatches log Ruby code, and then running the log.
I guess it depends on your definition of risk. The definition I was going by is the chance of getting a decent payout after spending 4 years of your life working somewhere. If you work for someone else's startup, especially for a tiny amount of equity, you risk forgoing the opportunity to enjoy the financial benefits of a successful exit after 4 years of hard work.
A founder can also get a job in 10 minutes if the startup flops. The additional sacrifice (not necessarily risk) the founders take is living a few months without salary. This sacrifice obviously merits a higher portion of the equity than an employee -- maybe even much higher -- but as an employee you have to wonder whether the tiny equity you'll get is worth it.
I think the chance of a "decent payout after spending 4 years of your life" is smaller than you expect, for both founders and employees.
I thought/think much the same as you, which is why I'm founding my own startup after working for 3 years at 2 other ones. I had similar equity offers as you - 0.1% at one startup, none at the second (and an offer of 0.02% at a third that I turned down). I used to think that employees were insane for taking a straight salary instead of a shot at a big payout. After 5 months working full-time on my own startup with no salary, I'm not entirely sure. Obviously I think that on-balance the startup bargain is more appealing, else I'd go get a job, but I also think the scales are much more even than I'd initial thought.
If you do take a job at the startup, take it to learn, not to get rich. You won't get rich. 80-90% of startups fail outright and nobody gets anything, other than whatever venture money was paid out in salaries. If it does succeed, you won't get rich with an employee's option grant, unless the startup really hits it big (like, Google or Microsoft-sized). One of my coworkers worked at a startup that was bought for $42M - he ended up with $3000. I do know someone else that ended up with a multi-million-$ payout as employee #35, but she was a VP and the company in question was Stratus, which momentarily had a billion-$ market cap. She ended up losing much of it when Stratus stock crashed anyway.
If you do go the founder route, do it for meaning and not for money. It has to be something you'd want to do anyways, regardless of whether there's a huge payout attached. Because from 5 months in, that huge payout looks pretty remote. (I wish I'd paid more attention to webwright's advice on tractability, in another comment thread.)
On a side note, I always wondered why some startups are so stingy with equity. If you give out big-company equity awards, you get big-company effort. And if the people who are actually doing the work are putting in big-company effort levels, how do you expect to catch the big companies? The conclusion I reached is that the startup should have product-market fit before hiring people, so that success is just a matter of crossing Ts and dotting Is, but neither of the startups I've worked at were at that point. (And sure enough, one failed outright and the other is sorta walking-dead: profitable but not growing, with a pretty narrow customer base.)
I'm not sure how the equity is currently divided, but these are very good questions, thanks. The company had an A round and it has about 10-15 employees.
I should have said that founders are exposed to greater risk in the very early days of the company, but afterwards the chance of meaningful financial payoff for employees becomes much smaller. Most startups won't be the next Google or Ebay, and I think they should take that into consideration when incenting their employees with stock options.
If the company already has about 10-15 employees, you're not looking at much equity left, assuming that the other employees get the same you do. If 2 founders and 10 employees got equal amounts, you would be looking at 8.3% per person, and if there were 17 people total (15 + 2 founders, not including you) that puts the company at 5.9% per person.
This is just a starting point, You have to assume that the founders have the lion's share of the equity, and that the amount of equity per additional employee trends downward the later the employee joined. It could be that the company only has 5% equity left for future employees, and so they have to offer only a small percentage of the equity. In any case, try to see what they have available, and again, offer to take only a token salary if anything in return for a greater equity share.
It's risky in the sense that the chance of a meaningful payoff is much smaller. I don't mind living on ramen for a while if it made the "dream" tangible.
If the difference between a founder and an employee were, say, 5x to 10x the equity, being an employee may make sense, but if it's 100x-400x range it just makes the employee stock options look pathetic.
