CategoryStartups

No, You CAN’T retire rich at 30 if you sell your startup

I personally find the people who are in the software startup game just for the money to often be nearly delusional about their chances of success and the likely magnitude of it when it happens. Before I get into the details for founders, let me talk about options-hungry employees. If you are in it for the money and you aren’t a founder, you’re sticking your head in the sand. Full stop...

Guide to Evaluating Startup Ideas

A great developer I once worked with was kvetching at lunch one day. He’d been working at a well-funded startup for about a year and had come to terms with the fact that the startup was really a pretty dumb idea. He’d wasted a year of his life and had a pile of stock options that weren’t very interesting. His last two jobs had been similar. He asked me a question that, at the...

How to Ask for an Introduction

I don’t know a ton of important people. But as a founder of a venture-backed startup with some amazing investors and advisors, I do know a few. With Nivi and Naval preaching the gospel of social proof (can I get an “amen”?!) and with fundraising posts and articles espousing the importance of introductions, it’s no surprise that about once a week someone asks me to...

A Newbie’s Guide to Startup Compensation (or “Stock Options will Make Me Rich!”)

My first experience with stock options was at the ripe age of 34 years old, when I was selling Jobby (retired) to Jobster (Gah, make the Web 2.0 names STOP!). Before that, I’d been running my own business for close to a decade– with good success, but there really wasn’t any sense in setting up an options plan. So when selling our company and getting presented with a cash/stock...