<p><pre><code> [T]he bonus was a life raft against personal
debts racked up while living in San Francisco
at a below market salary
</code></pre>
Never accept a below market salary unless you have serious skin in the game (i.e. founder-level equity). I probably sound like a broken record about this, but you have to assume that your equity in the company will never be worth anything, and—even if you are part of a 'successful' acquisition—you are liable to get an amount that brings you up to parity with the market...if you're willing to accept the golden handcuffs.<p>Think of your options (or RSUs, or whatever) in a company as being a lottery ticket. Odds are, it won't pay out. If it does, it's likely to be a trivial amount. For the rare cases where things really work out well (early employee at Facebook/Google), please try to remember that you were <i>really</i> lucky.
Microsoft's unwillingness to bump people to market is short sighted. I'd take the offer, then shift my hours to the bare minimum. I'd spend all the new free time learning or working on side projects. I damn sure wouldn't be all that committed to helping Microsoft beat google at search. This seems like the obvious thing to do, and not far from what the author did.
It was great working with Cliff and many other folks at Powerset. I think I got cynical a little earlier than some of the other folks and left before the acquisition, so I might be less justified in my opinion, but anyway,<p>On the below-market wages issue: I think Powerset's really crazy marketing/hype allowed it to hire stronger engineers than would have been justified given its product and technology. All the startup spinoffs he mentions (Serious Business, Crowdflower, Github... and later some more I can't even keep track of...) I think are an indication of that. I guess that's how you hire using equity. You could say it's taking advantage of the psychology of overvaluing low-probability, high-impact outcomes. Or you could say, those people were duped.<p>I'm just glad for all the folks who, like Cliff, were able to take the bonuses to help support families or later business ventures.
This goes to show that what may be right for one person may not be right for another, despite the terms being the same; all too often we fail to take external circumstances into account.<p>Yet, at the same time, if you hustle and are scrappy you can always find a way to make something come about.
Could someone explain what he means when he writes "...the payout breakdown was 30, 50, 20, meaning that Microsoft will probably get a 20% discount on your bonus if you were planning on leaving"?
It is all too easy to celebrate wild success as the "right" plan but we have to remember that success happens only to a very small minority and not everyone has the luxury to throw caution to the wind. For every wild success there are thousands of failures but of course we never talk about those.<p>Glad it worked out for both parties in this case even though they took very different paths
Seems like there's a lot of upset people commenting abou the realities of a good startup exit explicitly pointing out the realities of a non-founder. Probably why startup culture targets youthful employees.
Thanks for the counterpoint. It's definitely great that it worked out for both of you, but it's also nice to have a more balanced/grounded view of what happened to others coming out of the same situation.
I like the picture, $8 on a cat.
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