I appreciate this intent. I do wonder: do any of your team use this setting? I, too left VS Code after having to disable Copilot for the umpteenth time in a fit of frustration. I was aware of this setting and had it to disable all AI, alas.
The frustration for me is that it turned my editor into a 2000s-era popup extravaganza (not necessarily anti-AI). Every line of my editor was constantly throwing a new popup or text to the side of my cursor. I know that VS Code's design philosophy has moved toward trying to make the editor have as many pop-ups as possible, but there are still a lot of us that don't think that's a good way to focus on the work. It is beyond frustrating when every week or so your editor decides you're wrong about that.
Might want to check your math there. At $20/lb, zero waste (!!), 18g of coffee is $0.80/shot. Add in 10-15% waste (accurately predicting exact supply of beans is almost impossible, plus dialing in, mistakes, and training) and a more standard 22g basket, you get $1.12 per drink.
Aiming for 25% COGS, that pushes up the price of a cup to $4.50 before milk, syrups, cups, etc. If the cost of coffee doubled, you'd be looking at the cost of coffee only being 38% COGS for a $6 drink. That kind of increase is not only going to completely remove all margins, but likely put you in the red per drink served.
Those are some far fetched numbers, that's the price of premium/specialty coffee and the amount is easily a double shot, even triple by Italian standards.
Common commercial beans are ~$24/kg at retail prices, and while 14g would be a double shot around here, let's assume that's a "single shot" since standards seem to differ a lot. That puts us at a much more reasonable $0.39 per "shot" of coffee after accounting for 15% waste.
On a personal note, I would actively choose to pay $0.40 more for coffee if I knew that the money went back to the farmers who produce it.
I just did my math (because I was curious, not out of doubt) and it came out to $0.33 per espresso -- $20 for a 2 pound bag of beans from the grocery store @ 15g per "double shot" using the stock basket that came with the machine.
True, I'm not using 'premium' beans and probably doing it wrong but it works for me. Add in 'natural spring water' and 6oz of chocolate milk and I doubt it gets over $0.75.
If you are paying $20 a lb for expresso beans you are probably not a coffee shop and definitely not buying the coffee that costs $6 at a chain coffee shop.
The standard size for a bag of coffee is 12oz, at least in the US. $20/lb is equivalent to $15/12oz. $15 for a 12oz bag of coffee is pretty standard for anything that isn't bottom rung these days. It's not even 'great' coffee at that price; I'm just talking about something mid-tier like Counter Culture coffee which is available nationwide.
Anything cheaper than that and you are firmly into the budget coffee tiers.
There is no "standard 22g basket". Regular 8-12 oz drinks at most coffee shops have a single 7-10g shot. Double shots and larger sizes always cost more.
All espresso based drinks you will find will be double-based.
And especially any place which is doing specialty coffee is going to be using larger doses to make extraction more consistent with lighter roasted coffee (in the realm from 18g to 28g).
It's pretty normal nowadays to see 20g or 22g baskets used in specialty coffee shops.
You can obviously order a single but the price difference is just a trick, the other shot gets dumped unless two people order singles at the same time.
I have no idea what you are talking about. The world's largest coffee chain (Starbucks) uses a single 1 oz/7 g espresso shot in their short (8oz) And tall (12oz) drink sizes. To get two shots you have to upgrade to "grande" (16oz), or specifically ask for (and pay for) an extra shot. Most coffee shops do the same for their smaller drinks.
Starbucks does use singles in some Tall drinks (your point stands - Latte & Cappuccino), but not all (Americano & Flat Whites have 2 shots in a tall).
Meta: I've never seen anyone order a short, the only thing I've ever seen in those cups are espresso pulls or water (but it turns out a Short Flat White still has two shots - worth a look)
Starbucks makes coffee flavoured desert drinks. We are talking about specialty coffee shops. I've also never seen starbucks use a single shot basket to pour a single shot. They always just split, this is broadly the standard. Nobody outside of Italy is making single shots with a single shot basket.
Ask any coffee professional (someone who actually knows what they're doing).
Or just go walk around. Try to find a cafe which is using different portafilters with single spouts (an indication of a single shot basket). Or ask them. Buy a single espresso and watch what they do. You will never see them use a single shot basket or a single spouted portafilter. You will always see them split a double.
For #2:
Since nobody is using single shot baskets, and no reputable coffee shop is setting aside split shots to use in someone else's drink, the only time it would make sense to make a coffee from a single shot is if it would be too intense with a double (hard to imagine). The alternative is just wasting coffee in most cases except when you're lucky and your customers order drinks where you can use the other split shot. But I don't really see anyone splitting shots for milk drinks, maybe I've not paid enough attention as I don't drink them that often. Either way, you're still brewing a double shot.
You can again, just watch what they're doing. I've never seen a coffee shop where you can't see the bar and the machine. Just watch what happens.
Lastly, you can't dial in a single shot basket and a double shot basket at the same time, you need to have dedicated grinders dialled in for both. Nobody outside of Italy bothers with that. For specialty cafes you'd be doubling the number of dialled in grinders which would be especially impractical.
At least in Austria, this seems to be a recent phenomenon, and limited to "fancy" coffee places. I was surprised the first time I saw the barista throw away half the coffee when I ordered an espresso.
I don't have statistics, but I think that single spout portafilters are still common in traditional Austrian cafes. I agree that you can't perfectly dial in the grinder for both single and double shot, but only a minority of people care about James Hoffmann levels of perfection and outside of speciality coffee shops nobody drinks light roasts.
One curious thing I saw in a bar in Italy that their machine had a much smaller diameter portafilter, so they can make a 7g shot without these conical sieves.
Coffee is extremely finnicky and its really not as easy as you think to make even a passable shot when going between baskets with different doses. Even with an Italian dark roast.
This isn't about making amazing shots of light roast coffee, it's about the difference between an acidic and a bitter coffee. If your customers are buying and drinking straight espresso (also uncommon outside of Italy and some bordering countries) then they will notice and complain. Although I guess since most people in these regions drink singles, maybe cafes dial in for the single and just YOLO the double. I don't know much about how Italian cafes are ran as I am simply not into that style of coffee nor do I live in Italy. Outside of these regions where its common to drink straight espresso, most cafes just half ass the dialing in and if you ask for espresso its usually varying kinds of mediocre to trash. Regardless, nobody uses single baskets. In the specialty cafes where you can order a straight espresso and expect something decent to amazing, you also never see single baskets and single shots just result from a split with half of the shot wasted or in another concurrent customer's cup.
Regarding Austria, it seems like countries which border Italy also seem to often do single shots too. I didnt consider this but it also doesn't surprise me.
Regarding the portafilter, the industry has standardized on 58mm group heads in the commercial setting but there are still some smaller diameter machines out there which make pulling smaller shots much easier.
There are currently almost no new commercial machines in that format but its entirely possible it will change in the future.
I for one am considering buying an adapter for 49mm baskets so I can more easily extract good light roast espresso without needing the larger doses.
I know the struggle -- We have an espresso machine at home and would love to be a able to do both single & double shots, but I have never managed to find a setting that works for both, so it's dialled in to single shots. I figured that cafes maybe are better at finding a middle ground. There must be a reason why most grinders have two separate timers for single/double tap.
I don't carry around sources for well established industry wide facts which you can verify yourself by opening your eyes. Do you carry around a source that proves that using a keyboard to type is faster than using morse code?
James Hoffman (coffee professional, winner of WBC) discusses the obscurity of single dose baskets in his video here. He mentions they're not often used in the home because he is discussing home espresso but the 50 caveats of single dose baskets apply to the industry too.
Discussion of single baskets by The Wired Gourmet pointing out that in the industry double and triple baskets are used and split in vast preference to single shot baskets. Also covering the difficulty of working with single shot baskets:
The reason people in this section are disagreeing with me is because they have never made specialty espresso and have no idea how difficult it is to dial in a single basket, even if you're a cafe.
Again, this only takes basic experience in coffee/cafe drinks to understand this is true. The standard espresso based drinks are: espresso, cappuccino, latte, macchiato, cortado, flat white, americano, mocha, and a few other varieties. Every single one of those starts with a double shot of espresso (~1.5-2 fl oz of liquid). This is sometimes even referred to as a 'single shot' even though 1.5oz would put you in what is considered a double shot.
There may be some niche drinks that use less espresso liquid, but they're not common. If I was only given 0.8 fl oz (which, is what a single shot looks like) in an espresso drink I would be upset.
Yeah it's a general rule, there are some exceptions, but they're less common than is worth challenging this claim for. Some drinks would be too strong to be made from a double, these will use a split single in countries where doubles are the norm. The second shot will end up wasted unless someone else is ordering the same exact drink or ordering a single espresso (also rare outside of Italy and some other countries). I've seen it but most customers prefer to see bigger drinks these days so most cafes don't usually face this problem and make drinks from double shots.
For reference, I use a 36g shot (basically 36ml if you wait for the crema to dissipate) for a 170ml "flat white" at home. This achieves a balanced strength for this kind of drink. You really have to get into the tiny drink category before you really reach the realm of "this is too strong and I must use a split single". And, in those cases, due to the fact of the double shot (and, I would struggle to come up with "sources" but it's again generally accepted that unless you can use the second split shot for a drink immediately, it goes down the sink), you are still often using a double worth of coffee for a single shot drink.
lol this thread is amazing. Hacker news is truly a place filled with confidently wrong smart people. Showed this to my wife, a barista in Seattle, and she asked me why I go to this stupid fucking site. I wasn’t able to give a good answer other than boredom.
I mean if you think about it, almost nobody here is a Barista (home or commercial), but most people here are technical. People don't realise the complexity of coffee when they haven't actually tried making espresso so it's not too surprising that you get people who think they've figured it all out in their head. Same thing happens on this website with basically any niche technology (haha, I can't believe I am referring to brewing coffee as technology).
> you need to have dedicated grinders dialled in for both. Nobody outside of Italy bothers with that.
Huh? Most cafe's I see (Australia) the grinding is separate from the dispensing, and it is a single shot per pull. It's a big world out there mate, might be more of an isolated cultural thing than you realize or my neck of the woods is special. Either way, likely varies.
> Huh? Most cafe's I see (Australia) the grinding is separate from the dispensing, and it is a single shot per pull.
This is just not how espresso works.
You can dose the same grind into a double basket and a single basket and you will never get the same coffee out of both.
Maybe Australia is special but in Europe, the UK and America, except for Italy (and apparently some surrounding places) nobody is using single shot baskets.
This is jusg a well known fact in the coffee industry.
Many comments seem to be under the impression that we do not know or do not choose to build fire-resistant buildings.
We do know how. It is required by code. Chapter 7 of the IBC code is the specific section. It was adopted in 2007. Most houses in America pre-date 2007 construction. If only comments on the internet had the power to retrofit millions of structures across the country, we'd be set.
If I remember correctly, those protections are tailored mostly to interior fires. I believe there are additonal recommendations (not required in code) for homes in fire prone areas.
Edit: when I say not in code, I mean not in the IBC. I think CA has their own code for fire prone areas. I'm not sure if that code only applies to rural areas or not. One would hope that it applies universally and the rebuilding will be done with the fire hardening methods. Insurance might influence reconstruction too.
My understanding is building code primarily focuses on (1) primarily keeping occupants safe long enough to get out of the house (e.g. material must have a minimum fire resistance duration) (2) keeping emergency responders safe when entering a house fire (e.g. stair hand rails cannot be open to avoid snagging fire fighter clothes or hoses). Once these two tasks are done, the code doesn't really care if the house burns to the ground.
Further, these codes are often the reference base used nationally. They're a reasonably safe base, but different location may add more requirements.
The Wildland Codes are specifically for wildfires, which burn longer and more intensely.
Not baiting. You can compare chapter 7 to the CA wildlands code and see the dramatic difference in fire prevention. As others have pointed out, the newer construction made under the code you are referencing are still burning to ground.
Plenty of newer buildings in Altadena also burned just as easily. One of the high end assisted living facilities that was built in the last five years is almost completely gone and they could afford a lot more fire mitigation than the individual home owners.
Surely the problem here is one of policy and political will. In terms of cost I can't imagine that the damage done by unplanned firestorms leveling cities is less than retrofitting or controlled burns.
It is never really that simple. Here is a thought experiment:
How does the idea of defensible space work if your neighbor's walls are 5 feet from your walls? What happens when an entire neighborhood is that closely spaced? How do you retrofit the space between buildings?
There are dozens of challenges like the above, and a lot of them delve into personal freedoms. Should you be able to choose what trees to plant on your property? Should you be allowed a shed? Should the government use air surveillance to enforce the cleanliness of your backyard?
There's lots we can do, lots we should do, but it is far from a simple path with a singular solution.
Townhouses with no intervening space would likely be an improvement. Browse Altadena in streetview and you'll see loads of houses with vegetation -- tinder -- stacked between them. Getting rid of those intervening spaces entirely would reduce the surface area exposed to embers while simultaneously depriving homeowners the temptation to store fuel in unwise places.
It totally depends on the type of vegetation. Some species, at least while alive, retain water and resist burning, acting as natural fire stops. Other species, including many imported to the area for aesthetic purposes, act as dry tinder.
30 years ago your PC was at least your PC, now they shove all kinds of cloud and AI services down the users' throat and put ads where they don't belong.
I have seen a lot of companies, a lot of rounds. I have known zero founders who have turned down an option to take money off the table (and zero A raises that offered that to employees). I love the idea of your universe, though.
All you’re saying is that in the contemporary context it’s exceedingly foolish to be an employee at an early startup. The VCs and founders have optimized away all the incentive. Eventually the message will reach even naive 22 year olds.
I'd tweak this slightly: "It's exceedingly foolish to be an employee at an early startup for the money."
I think there are a lot of us who struggle to fit the larger corporate mold who pretty much only thrive in the startup world. I can't speak for all of them, but I've been very willing to take the balance of lower cash compensation and a fistful of lottery tickets and not having 12 layers of middle management breathing down my neck over more liquidity.
I guess I'm also blessed with inexpensive tastes, which helps, but I'm still able to live somewhere I love and do all the things I care to do, so it works out.
Why does everyone thinks startups don’t pay well? I have worked for various startups all my life, most of them well funded, and competing for talent with faangs. Yes, I could probably make more at Google but I don’t feel like I’m underpaid. At the last 3 startups my base salary was above 250k. I work remotely and I rarely work more than 30 hours a week.
I’d say you’re uncommon. I’ve never seen anyone who is a typical engineer making $250k/yr at a startup that’s below $1B valuation. Same for the amount of work you’re doing and that it’s remote with that compensation.
It’s possible you’d be making $700k+/yr if you were at google. About triple what you are now.
I think one component of their point is that the marginal utility of money beyond $200k/year cash comp is quite small, especially if you (1) came to tech early in life (2) plan on staying in it for most of your working life.
With that perspective, $200k/year and $700k/year both reduce to "well-paid".
Also, a Staff title at a Seed or Series A startup can definitely ask for $250k/year, although they'd likely be trading off against equity grants.
Whoa, that doesn't even pass the smell test, let alone any kind of deeper analysis.
Certainly this depends on where you're going to live, but if you're in a place where startups are common (even considering the current remote work situation), $200k/yr will either be a stretch for you to meet your living expenses, or will require that you live fairly modestly, especially if you have dependents. If you are able to put any of that into savings/investments, it will be a fairly small amount.
With $700k/yr, you can live quite comfortably, while putting quite a bit away for retirement.
And I don't think your (1) & (2) points really make sense here. Investments compound over time; starting off in your early 20s putting $50k in your investment/retirement accounts every year vs $10k will give you a very different outcome once you reach retirement age. Hell, you'll reach a very different outcome in your 40s. (But honestly, if you decided to live a $200k/yr lifestyle at $700k/yr, you'll be saving so much money that you could easily retire in your 30s.)
It will also mean getting to put a down payment on that house much earlier, and/or being able to afford more of a house. And in the meantime, it will mean being able to dine at fancier restaurants, take more luxurious vacations, buy more expensive toys, etc., if that's the sort of thing you value. And I wouldn't even consider all this to be lifestyle creep (as you genuinely wisely advise against downthread of a sibling comment); this kind of lifestyle would be perfectly sustainable at $700k/yr, but not at $200k/yr.
(But really, though, who the hell is making $700k/yr in their early 20s? Very few, very exceptional people, that's who.)
I will happily die on the hill that the marginal utility at $200k vs $700k is a pure function of your lifestyle, even in high cost-of-living areas (I live in one of the highest!). Your choice of adjectives "modestly", "fairly small", "quite comfortably", and "quite a bit" that are ways for smuggling lifestyle choices into the equation, which might apply to you but are by no means universal.
This boils down to "if you have more money, you can spend more money and maybe retire early". This is not a line of reasoning I'm trying to refute.
Dependents are an interesting wrinkle that is worth discussing separately. But let's stay on the straight and narrow, we can talk about in another comment if you wish.
> And I don't think your (1) & (2) points really make sense here. Investments compound over time
The reason I invoked these points was not to compare "could you save $50k at age 22 or $10k at age 22?", it was to compare "could you save $10k at age 22 or $50k at age 32?"
If you're beginning a high-income career later in life, the time-value of money is different because you have less time.
If you start early, you actually need to earn less to hit the same comparatively "fixed" long-term savings goals, because you have more time to compound.
Again, be careful to avoid falling back on "if you have more money, you'll have more money, which is obviously good".
> And I wouldn't even consider all this to be lifestyle creep
Regularly dining at fancy restaurants (anything in the Michelin orbit), taking luxurious vacations (I'd define as anything north of $300/day), and purchasing expensive toys (I don't think this needs any qualification...) is indeed the definition of lifestyle creep, and it's A-OK that they aren't sustainable at $200k/yr.
You can live extremely comfortably without these things. Whether you perceive them as acceptable or not is a you thing, not an objective thing. We actually do get to choose our values and our hobbies!
I would revisit that calculation assuming you are drained at 45 instead of 60, including taxes and the opportunity cost of 500K x a few years at 3% rate for the next 15 years.
That's pretty much exactly the calculation I'm positing. But actually with an even earlier terminus (late 30s or 40 at most).
Assume an "effective" average pay (i.e. "net" pay + retirement and other deductions, inflation-adjusted to today's dollars and averaged over the course of your career) of $120k/year.
From age 22 to 40, you've earned $2.16mm in inflation-adjusted-to-today dollars as a single earner. With a not-unreasonable average savings rate of 30%, not accounting for tax-advantaged growth or any growth at all, you'll come out with $650k of inflation-adjusted-to-today capital in savings.
Realistically, this should end up invested in some kind of equity (housing, stocks, bonds, whatever). If you finance the purchase of a house at 30, you're only 10 years into a traditional 30-year mortgage at this point, for reference. So you're roughly 1/3rd of your way to owning all the equity in your home. That's fairly comfortably a $1mm home (home equity being 30% of your assets at 40).
Of course, if you're DCA-ing into something that yields a modest average of 5%/year in inflation-adjusted returns, that $650k is closer to $1mm inflation-adjusted-to-today capital. And you still have 25 years at that point for your retirement savings to compound. And you can work part-time in something more fulfilling until retirement to supplement your income.
YMMV, but the marginal utility of money beyond $1mm in equity at 40 and $6k/month in expendable (on rental housing, food, travel, social events) income during your 20s and 30s is pretty small for most people. If you add a partner with any kind of income to the mix, it makes the marginal stress of earning more money even less appealing.
Edit: the main thing you ought to avoid like the plague is lifestyle creep. Spending money on things with zero or vanishingly-small happiness ROI. Read this story every year or two, or whenever you get a raise at work. https://www.marxists.org/archive/tolstoy/1886/how-much-land-...
What many people don’t seem to realize is there are a lot of early stage but already well funded (10M+) startups who are desperately looking for top quality people. Once I was approached by a founder who offered 500k base salary (wasn’t a good fit for my area of expertise).
Well, in my experience, these are quite uncommon. Especially for being fully remote.
If someone's offering $500k/yr to an engineer plus stock, they're definitely trying to attain someone with very niche skills. Which begs the question: Just how applicable is this scenario for everyone else?
I haven't found many startup roles going past $200k for a fully remote engineer, almost regardless of level. I don't think they even try to get someone who would be Staff+ at FAANG because it's basically pointless.
Top quality in your scenario might mean niche skills like you've done specific computer vision work, have a PhD, and are going to a self-driving startup... Cool but not really applicable to most of us, is it?
Whereas compare as to how common it is to be a typical full stack or backend engineer with a decade of experience... join FAANG at Staff and make $600k+.
Eh, not quite your $250k number, but I was making (inflation adjusted) $200k/yr at a startup with ~$100M valuation back in 2010 (senior SWE level). Not sure if I'm typical, though.
> It’s possible you’d be making $700k+/yr if you were at google.
Possible, sure, but not likely. For a mid-tier SWE joining Google (or another FAANG) today, even $350k/yr salary+equity is probably above the median.
Also that feels like a specious comparison: most people (including those who would be otherwise joining a startup) are not joining a FAANG, and will not be getting paid as well.
It's a difficult trade off I've found. Large tech companies are boring and slow and you deal with a lot of red tape and BS, and you feel utterly powerless in the security of your own job as economic tidal waves direct the momentum of layoffs and not your personal contribution.
At a startup you have more autonomy and power over your personal position. I wrote 90% of the code that is generating company growth, released 2 months after a layoff. If I had taken longer to release that code or if my code didn't work the company would be in a worse financial position.
But that also means a lot of personal stress. There aren't 4 layers of middle management to catch flak for you. If you fuck something up, you are directly responsible and depending on the environment that can result in some heated conversations. I also work way harder at a startup than I ever did for a big company
Those are the factors that make the tradeoff easy for me. I would vastly prefer direct accountability for my own fuckups, because that means I have the agency to do something to fix it.
What makes me want to put my head through a wall is when I fuck up, and four layers of people above me are the only ones allowed to fix the thing, but they don't, so I keep catching flak for my fuckup without any way to stop it and fix the thing. I have many more heated conversations with those managers, which typically leads to the door.
When I fuck something up, rarely is anyone more upset about that than I am. Nobody's dumping more heat on me than I am on myself, so bring on the heat-- as long as I have the agency to fix the problem.
> All you’re saying is that in the contemporary context it’s exceedingly foolish to be an employee at an early startup.
As a rule, it is and always has been. For every unicorn piñata stuffed with winning lottery tickets, there are hundreds/thousands? of others whose employees walk away with nothing or less (debt, strained relationships, mental health issues, etc.) at worst or a job at AcquiHireCo at best.
There was always very high risk, so it was only ever for certain people. But in earlier iterations of SV it was possible to become generationally rich as an early employee. The VCs and founders have fixed the glitch.
To put it another way: early employee equity was always a lotto but now the payout is like some lame scratch off instead of the powerball jackpot.
The startups where employees get really rich still exist. I'm pretty sure the early employees of OpenAI are generationally rich for example.
It's just that these companies very often are the darlings since their inception, get constantly talked about. Everyone wants to to invest in them and everyone wants to join them. So they have the ability to pick out the best talent, in other words, it's unlikely you'll be able to join that specific startup.
But even 20 years ago, try getting into early Google. From what I heard they had extremely high bars for hiring as well and only lowered them once they got so large that the pool was exhausted.
I'd argue that the total comp at the established companies for engineers has increased precisely because of competition from startups: to make the startup not be the better option.
Does that mean that VCs are not taking a bigger slice than they used to? Absolutely not, but I wouldn't put the blame solely on them.
We’ll see when it happens. If I had to name a company most likely to have massive landmines buried in front of common stock cashing out, it would be at the top of the list.
> All you’re saying is that in the contemporary context it’s exceedingly foolish to be an employee at an early startup. The VCs and founders have optimized away all the incentive. Eventually the message will reach even naive 22 year olds.
My startup idea is a firm that uses generative AI to flood the internet with pro-startup, pro-VC, pro-founder propaganda, so that message will never reach the naive 22 year olds. Personally, I think it's like saving the environment, since naive 22 year olds are precious resource we cannot allow to be destroyed.
I wouldn't even say "contemporary"; people have been saying this (and I believe it's been true) for decades.
But overall that statement is making a lot of assumptions.
It's assuming money is the main priority for everyone. Sometimes the priority is to have a ton of autonomy and influence on product direction, not have to deal with 8 layers of management, and have an actual, large, often-measurable impact on the company's success.
It's assuming that the alternative is that anyone can work at a FAANG, and be in the higher tiers of salary they offer for their quite-above-average employees (hired today, not 10 or 20 years ago). Most competent, talented people won't pass an interview at a FAANG. Of those that do, many of them will not immediately be making $500k/yr. These points are especially true for 22 year olds, naive or otherwise.
I was going to make a comment about working your ass off at a startup vs. working 9-5 at a more established company, but I know plenty of people at FAANGs who work 50- or 60-hour weeks, every week, and often put in time on weekends. Granted, I would agree that pretty much everyone at a small/early startup is going to be working long hours, while a large number of people at a FAANG are going to enjoy a nice, relaxing life outside of work, so they're not at all equivalent in that regard.
> All you’re saying is that in the contemporary context it’s exceedingly foolish to be an employee at an early startup.
As long as naive 22 year olds think have that one friend that stuck around long enough to cash out on an IPO, then yes. On a risk-adjusted basis, this has basically always been the case - you're better off working at FAANG.
I hear this a lot, but most people -- even otherwise-startup people, even if they interview -- don't get to work at a FAANG.
And I think starting now at a FAANG is a lot less lucrative than people seem to think for the average (or even above-average) employee. Certainly nowhere near as lucrative as it was 7-10 years ago or more.
If you only care about money, sure. I have plenty of friends working in FAANG. For some mysterious reason any time I ask them about work, they say something along the lines "ehh... it's fiiiine. Paycheck is pretty good though". Okay, not all, but perhaps 95%. And half of them work massive overtime on regular basis. I can get behind working weekends when you hope to change the world. They often say things like: "yeah, I have to work 60-70h per week because I don't want my boss to yell at me". Those who work normal hours say: "there is not much work to do really, we literally have meetings about meetings to fill the day. I wish I had some real work to do". I truly hope that higher TC compensates for that.
The Bay Area housing market is too competitive for this. If you’re renting a room in your early 20s then sure just have fun, any tech job should cover it. If you want to own a place to raise a family in by your 30s, and you don’t have some exogenous source of wealth, you’re going to need every dollar of liquid compensation you can possibly get.
I was offered the option to liquidate up to 20% of my vested shares at my last company's Series A. It was restricted by tenure though (3 years), so it wasn't available to everyone. In retrospect, I should have liquidated the full amount, but it was a new concept to me at the time and I was more conservative with the amount.
I more recently interviewed with a pre-series A company and they said that they'd include me in a liquidity event when I brought up compensation.
Doing this by tenure seems like a fairer way to distribute the liquidity. The founders still get preferential access to it, but because they really have taken more risk (bigger stake for a longer time period), not just because they have a better individual negotiating position.
> The founders still get preferential access to it, but because they really have taken more risk
It's not related to risk, at least not directly. It's related to the supply of entrepreneurship as a factor of production. Entrepreneurship is scarce, so founders have leverage in any bargaining situation against early employees, who are more numerous and therefore less valuable and less powerful. If 10x the number of people tried to become founders, then founders would hold less leverage and the equity terms would become more "fair" because they'd have no choice but to give generous terms if they wished to hire people.
Your comment is somewhat buried downthread, but I think this is a super valuable insight. Ultimately it's not about fairness, it's about who has negotiating power, and about what contract terms founders and investors can get away with and still have a pool of employee talent competent enough for their needs.
But this isn't a static situation. For example, the article author points out that his startup doesn't reduce the options-expiration clock to 90 days after leaving the company, and I've read of similar cases in the past 5 years or so. I wouldn't say this practice is common now, but I feel like this was unheard of around, say, 2010.
After the company I worked at went public in 2016, they did another public offering 2 or 3 months later, before the 6-month lockup period ended. Nonetheless, they allowed employees to participate and sell up to 10% of their shares in this offering. I feel like this sort of thing is more common these days, and absolutely wasn't 20 years ago.
Established still-private companies like Stripe, and even newer ones like OpenAI, have given employees the opportunity to sell some of their equity to new investors during funding rounds, giving them some pre-IPO/pre-exit liquidity. There are certainly other examples of this in recent years. That surely was rare in the past.
I'm not sure what's driving these changes. Employees have been gaining more negotiating power somehow. Maybe that's a function of labor supply. Maybe that's a function of employees being better educated now about corporate finance and the things that are possible but historically not offered. Not sure.
Tenure/cliffs/etc should already take care of that by gating access to shares/options/etc in the first place. No need to add an extra tenure complication to liquidity as well.
How would you negotiate that in practice? Would it be reasonable to ask for it to be in your contract? How would you suggest wording it roughly? Sorry I'm inexperienced with this kind of thing and have no idea how I would go about negotiating for it.
I think for the most part you can't negotiate for this sort of thing, because most companies are not going to work up a one-off, custom equity comp agreement. Not just for you, someone they've just finished interviewing, seem to have some enthusiasm about, but ultimately they have only a vague idea of how you're going to perform or how long you're going to stick around. Either the company offers it, or they don't.
I think more companies offering it is maybe driven by feedback loops around recruiting (prospective employees asking for more and varied opportunities for compensation, and rejecting offers that don't include them). And also perhaps by employees just simply becoming educated about and talking about this stuff, with the sometimes-tacit understanding that they're going to be looking elsewhere for other employment opportunities if their employers don't give them more than just salary bumps and occasional equity grant refreshes.
Great, thanks for the response. That seems like a realistic perspective on what is achievable in most cases. I guess it's good to have it in mind as something to raise on the offchance it might be something a particular company is willing to be flexible on.
> I was offered the option to liquidate up to 20% of my vested shares at my last company's Series A. It was restricted by tenure though (3 years), so it wasn't available to everyone. In retrospect, I should have liquidated the full amount, but it was a new concept to me at the time and I was more conservative with the amount.f
Oh wow, how many companies have a series A after 3 years? How did your company survive without any raises for 3 years and what made your company finally decide to raise money after going 3 year without doing so?
That policy was actually one of the major reasons I liked that company and stuck with them for so long. Their goal early on was to avoid raising money if at all possible, and they managed that for a long time by mostly being cash-flow positive/profitable. The trade off is slower, but sustainable growth.
We hit an inflection point in the early pandemic where money was cheap and we had a ton of new customers coming in, so we were able to secure very favorable terms for the Series A and used that money to expand the business. Things continued to go in the right direction for the next ~2 years and we ended up doing a Series B round, and that in retrospect was a mistake. We over-hired in 2022 and couldn't back that up with increased business. And because we had given up so much control to investors in the previous rounds, we were unable to return to the sustainable-growth strategy that had worked for us in the past, and had to adopt faster growth strategies, none of which panned out and ultimately hurt the company and led to many rounds of lay-offs.
As someone inside the tech industry, I absolutely agree.
The problem is that new startups often don't have options here. Unless you're in a market where VCs are shy about funding new companies, if you don't take the VC cash and go into high-growth mode, someone else will, and they'll end up out-competing you, at least in the short term. (Long enough that you won't be able to remain solvent, at least.) So you either fail, or take the money and often get into a situation of doing not-particularly-sustainable things.
If you have 200 million "of your own money" to spare, you are no longer just a person for the purposes of this conversation, you're a walking VC fund, and you're not really risking a substantial change to your quality of life going from 250M to 50M net worth. Your living expenses are already generously compensated for by the large salary that you, the VC fund pays you, the person, out of your personal bank account, and they will be paying you those expenses until the end of your natural life. This isn't "risk" in the same sense as somebody who jumps to supplement their $150k salary with $450k of founder liquidity because it dramatically changes the material security of their life.
> If you have 200 million "of your own money" to spare, you are no longer just a person for the purposes of this conversation, you're a walking VC fund, and you're not really risking a substantial change to your quality of life going from 250M to 50M net worth.
Is that what happened? I thought he had $200m, and put in $200m.
It's true that that's what I thought, which is my statement. And it's better caveated than the previous one, which implied uncaveated that he still had $50m, but hasn't attracted the eye of any budding skeptics.
Did this guy just literally ask an AI chatbot for insight on SpaceX's classified military plans?
> "It is unlikely that these gaps can be closed until the end of the decade."
I actually worked out my own BFR plan over the couple years of teasers we had leading up to the 2016 IAC presentation. It was based on a 3-part vehicle a bit like Soyuz (separate hab and capsule) of 15m diameter for the launcher and 12m diameter for the upper stage, payload, and capsule, which seemed to offer more options than a 2-part vehicle.
Musk makes some very optimistic plans, some of them clearly without doing the math, and each numerically extraordinary aspect renders the other numerically extraordinary aspects more difficult to believe. Even if you can class 80 or 90% of his ideas as "Audacious but feasible", there are frequent areas where he gets ahead of himself and projects unlikely extremes that become numerical impossibilities in conjunction with each other.
What is clear is that you can launch a colony on Mars based around Starship-like vehicles, but the number of launches per human Mars resident to sustain and switch them out is large ("100 colonists per launch vehicle" is wildly overshooting; Keeping 100 colonists alive for a return mission will require hundreds of Starship-sized launches, some of them years in advance), the risks are large, and that the missions are at minimum conjunction-class (a 3 year round trip) rather than opposition class. A colony that attempts to grow until it approaches self sufficiency demands lots and lots of automation, an expansive ISRU, mining, and agricultural industry, and a population of maybe ~10^4 people; Getting there is going to demand literally 10^5 to 10^6 launches, decades of work, and 10^4 to 10^5 reusable launch vehicles in play for decades.
But it's got to start somewhere; Hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit like "Flags and footprints" and "We can save some cost by using a once-in-a-decade Venus orbital assist" and "We can fit a manned Mars program into a 20 billion dollar NASA budget in theory" does not colonize other planets at all.
Musk & Griffin had a relationship around establishing a Mars colony even before SpaceX foundation. Musk even tried to recruit Griffin when assembling SpaceX founding team.
It depends on the kind of lifestyle you want to live, I guess. If you want to live in a $30M mansion estate with 24/7 domestic staff and have several vacation homes around the world, $50M might not cut it, while $250M should cover it just fine.
If you have a philanthropic bent and want to be able to fund various charities to the tune of $5M or $10M per year (in addition to a reasonably luxurious lifestyle, though considerably less than the above hypothetical), $50M might not be enough to sustain that over time, but $250M probably will.
I think it's fair to say that there's not much difference between net worths of $25M and $50M, or between $50M and $75M. But jumping an order of magnitude from $50M to $250M will let you live a very different kind of life, if you so choose.
Also, that may have kept tesla and spacex 'afloat' but what really saved both companies was billions upon billions of dollars in government contracts, subsidies, preferential loans, and tax breaks. Nevada alone gave nearly two billion dollars to Tesla.
The government is not monolithic and politicians might except other things than what their constituents want. It's a bad test of the value of an investment.
For sure, and it may well have been a terrible investment with terrible returns, but selling to the government and responding to government incentives is an entirely legitimate thing to do, rather than some kind of inherent weakness in a company’s model. A company being “saved” by a government contract is a company being saved by making sales to its largest customer.
This assumes that the founders are aware of, or offered, the option. If anything this is an argument for why founders should be represented by a banker or lawyer at the closing of every investment round. Let the founders do the negotiating, but once it comes time to sign the papers, bring in the sharks.
Honestly if a founder isn't pulling in finance or legal experts prior to signing a funding round they really have no business being in position to begin with. They have to know VCs are leaning on their own financial experts and lawyers, why would you not have your own to protect your own interests?
A: I’ve seen many founders who got deep into the fundraising cycles without ever realizing they could take a cent out.
B: I have known zero founders who have turned down an option to take money off the table [...] I love the idea of your universe, though.
Fortunately, our universe is massive with varied different views. Even OP implied that they have experienced both sides firsthand.
> I have known zero founders who have turned down an option to take money off the table (and zero A raises that offered that to employees).
Have seen companies offer this to employee's
And companies that let employee's take money off the table at series A are also likely to be generous with meaningless titles; that is they will let early employee's call themselves founders.
Why is it insane? Some founders take zero salary since the start, and part of the reason for raising funds is that they have to eat too. Anyone who is an "early employee" usually get lower salary than market, and some stock. It's only fair they get to cash out a little early on, or hold on if they're liquid and think it's worth a lot more.
It also works well for everyone involved if they're selling their shares to the investors for Series A - investors get shares for cheaper, founders get paid based around the value of those shares, more cash & runway in the bank.
In my industry the series A occurs in the first year of operation, and before the company has really achieved anything. A founder taking money off the table then is ludicrous.
Founders who have no need for money in the first year or two are fortunate people who are either already wealthy or have a spouse or family supporting them. Surely those aren't the only types of people worth backing.
I see. Here, the first stage is seed, which is around the level of YC and then Series A, which is around the level of getting money from YC's Demo Day investors.
We also see pre-seed, where the goal is to get into an accelerator. It's like $2000 for 3%. Enough for a domain name, a laptop, a babysitter, something that gives you the space to do a proof of concept, but not a full MVP.
Here where VC funding is dry, we also have some stage between seed and Series A, where the startup raises from friends, angels, crowdfunding. It's not really given a name because it's a signal that the company has already burned through seed and yet hasn't done enough to raise Series A from proper "professionals".
But here, by the time you've raised Series A, you're expected to be #1 in a market - best language app, best tax app, etc. And Series A is just to prove it works in other markets. Worst case I've seen was a guy raising US$500k seed (not Series A), but they had to prove they could be #1 in five countries.
US is a market of 300M people and even top companies like Amazon don't have to go far, but many countries have both low population and low spending, and investment is still US-centric.
In SV-style tech companies it's common for the first round of funding to be considered a "seed" round; it usually comes from angel investors and/or friends and family, though it's not unheard of for larger institutions to get involved at this point.
By the time they're ready for a series A (VCs/larger institutional investors, though sometimes angel investors from the seed round participate as well) they'll very often have something to show for it, and may even have paying customers. The A round can come during the first year of operation, or later.
Given this, it's not uncommon for founders to be able to have some liquidity during their series A. Granted, it's usually not going to be a ton of money, but it can be a nice bonus that allows the founders to pay off debt they might have accrued during the first stages of the company, or perhaps move out of their 1BR apartment and put a down payment on a larger house, etc.
I have witnessed small liquidity events at Series A and Series B that allowed for some small percentage of all total equity vested (around 3-5% ish, depending on the terms of your specific options grant) to be cashed out at some multiple of the FMV price. AFAIK the founders held themselves to the same restrictions (5% total, I believe?) to keep it relatively "fair".
Pre-Seed, Seed, and some really really early Series A employees got to cash out fairly significant chunks of equity. Not as much as a founders' 1-2 million, enough for downpayments on homes or slick new cars all cash. The founders apparently were incredibly generous to Seed stage employees.
Still doesn't compare to a Founders' equity, as this article implies.
VCs will go along with or sometimes even encourage founders to take a little bit out, but employees rarely don’t have the same level of bargaining power.
My MY definitely builds up ice in the wheel wells a lot worse than any other car I've had in snow climates (VW R32, F150, 4Runner, Subarau Crosstrek). If we don't remember to clear them every day, they can build up and freeze into glaciers that limit the car from turning.
I'm impressed 120V works for you! The first year we owned it, we had to get a charger once the winter hit. At 120V, it was estimating up to 24 hours of pre-conditioning before it would start charging. And our winters are pretty mild in comparison (Tahoe, CA).
I was not planning on driving it in winter; sadly my main drive got into an accident and I had to pull it out of storage.
However, even at worst, I might use 60% of the battery in a day. I can easily charge 20-30 overnight so I generally make it back over a few days. Having a few bad days might result in me hitting the free L2 charger at the grocery store for an hour or two.
It isn't optimal so I've been looking at switching my garage door to a 240V charger. However, in actuality, I haven't had any major problems so holding off until I renovate the garage makes a lot of sense (I am planning on adding ground mount solar from which I intend on charging it but that's another story)
Oh; and likewise, I've never had a car build up so much snow. I assume it is due to efficiency or whatever, but my Toyota Sienna and my old Ford Mustang never required me to really get rid of all the snow to drive normally. Calgary also doesn't really plow the snow, so it's a problem on the once or twice a month that it snows and a few days after (until the snow melts)
For most urban areas where this contamination is prevalent (old dry cleaner & brake cleaner spills), there are a limited number of well heads that pull from the polluted aquifers to supply municipal water.
Capital gains is wage theft. If you have money, you are taxed at a lower rate than people who have to earn it. Carried interest is just a follow-through of this principle that is apparent at every level of American government. Those with money steal from those who must earn it.
This is an extremely poorly written article. I'm glad most of the comments seem to be ignoring the actual text in it.
What collateral damage is being done? It seems to me the opposite of collateral damage is being done: Mailchimp has banned cryptocurrency-related email lists, and those writing cryptocurrency-related emails have lost that ability.
Beyond the absurdity of the title, email has always been decentralized. Anyone with a server can send or receive email with whatever technology stack they so wish. Of course, because there is no trust framework, there's no guarantee that your email will get delivered… Which is why Mailchimp validated the opposite of the article's conclusion: there is lots of value in centralizing the management of email. They can act as a trusted authority to negotiate with various email hosts and guarantee(-ish) to customers that the emails will get delivered.
The damage is that if you're writing about cryptocurrency as a topic, the same way any media publication would (rather than trying to scam anyone or sell anything) you're still getting shut down.
All of the examples in the article (zeitgeist-style newsletters) fall very clearly under a marketing umbrella by my judgement. They're the TV Guides of cryptocurrency. Maybe they don't (all) have affiliate links, but advertising is far beyond that line in 2018. If it's got the name of a specific currency in any of the emails, it's marketing.
> If it's got the name of a specific currency in any of the emails, it's marketing.
I think this is way too broad and leads to absurd conclusions. For instance there's an MIT research group whose mailing list I subscribe to (not mailchimp) and which would fall under marketing by your criteria. Papers with specific cryptocurrency names occasionally appear in top CS conferences.
Yes, capitalism has infested every corner of our existence. Universities and conferences are massive distributors of marketing materials. They are both capitalistic enterprises.
It is very difficult to find non-marketing content in modern times. Especially in America.
Do you think literally every piece of research which studies for e.g. something about ethereum is marketing for ethereum? Would you use the same logic to conclude that a systems paper that implements some novel kernel architecture by patching linux and running experiments is "marketing for Linux"? That someone implementing a novel language feature in GHC is "marketing for Haskell"? That a paper evaluating QUIC using anonymous Chrome telemetry is "marketing for Chrome"?
The whole business model of MailChimp is to get people to pay to send emails, so obviously they are not averse to marketing per se. The reason people are unhappy is that if I can send "MySQL news this week" updates to my hypothetical subscribers on MailChimp, why can't I send "Ethereum news this week"? Educational and informational materials are significantly different from "Buy my token!11"
If you're paying to send people "Ethereum news this week", it's because you have a financial interest in promoting certain things that happen on Ethereum. There are plenty of places you can discuss Ethereum without paying for it.
Fill me in here: if you're really not selling or promoting anything, what's the use case of MailChimp? MailChimp didn't make all other mailing lists and forums stop existing. It's just the service that's optimized for marketing, for the case where if someone doesn't see your e-mail, it's your loss and not theirs.
Like, if you want to have an erudite discussion of the technical and mathematical underpinnings of zk-SNARKs, there must be a substantial number of people in that discussion who are capable of setting up a Mailman server.
The New York Times has newsletters. They are 'promoting' their content by sending you email updates, but that doesn't mean they are equivalent to ICO scammers.
Here's a response from MailChimp to a nonprofit educational org that suggests they are willing to make distinctions and not just class everyone who writes blockchain-related content as shady: https://twitter.com/MailChimp/status/981554164626010112
I don't know why you'd think I'd be surprised that MailChimp has customers who use it for its purpose, which is marketing.
It seems you're saying that MailChimp should be entirely neutral and should let you promote anything you want, and they disagree. MailChimp does not want to allow cryptocurrency promotions. Cryptocurrency promotions have negative externalities. That's not collateral damage, it's the entire point of their decision.
Whether they are "equivalent to ICO scammers" doesn't enter into it.
Hi, I wrote the article (although not the title). I highlighted this as an issue because MailChimp said it would allow cryptocurrency newsletters that weren't pumping ICOs to keep doing their thing, but didn't follow through on that — or at least hasn't yet.
My biggest problem with the article is that it doesn't even define "ICO". There's this whole community around cryptocurrency trading which seems to have popped up quite suddenly in just the past year or so, with their own jargon and memes.
I own small amounts of Bitcoin and Monero, I've been following the technology with interest for quite some time, and yet the whole "crypto" craze still seems like another alien world.
The frustration for me is that it turned my editor into a 2000s-era popup extravaganza (not necessarily anti-AI). Every line of my editor was constantly throwing a new popup or text to the side of my cursor. I know that VS Code's design philosophy has moved toward trying to make the editor have as many pop-ups as possible, but there are still a lot of us that don't think that's a good way to focus on the work. It is beyond frustrating when every week or so your editor decides you're wrong about that.