Startups Under what scenario might my shares become worthless? |
- Under what scenario might my shares become worthless?
- Startup founders, mental health, and social pressure: a perspective piece
- High school Baking Business
- Business partner wants me to sell back half my equity to pitch business to investors
- How to handle sales guy who doesn't want commission but instead equity
- Educate me regarding taking a prototype to production
- What’s the procedure of redirecting payment from one user to another?
- Narrowing the scope of target users
- How to progress with a possibly failed startup?
| Under what scenario might my shares become worthless? Posted: 05 Jan 2022 03:47 PM PST I work at a relatively mature private technology company with a current valuation of $2-3 billion. Part of my compensation includes an options grant, of which about 57,000 options have now vested. I'm interested in leaving the company and I want to ensure I extract some value out of those vested options. Unfortunately, the strike price is relatively high at around $1.80, so exercising all of them would cost about ~$100k. I've heard of horror stories regarding things like "liquidation preferences" and such that cause some employees equity to be worthless. I'd need to liquidate a substantial portion of my current investments to come up with enough cash to exercise those options, and so I am curious about what potential scenarios might lead to the shares becoming worthless. Thanks! [link] [comments] |
| Startup founders, mental health, and social pressure: a perspective piece Posted: 05 Jan 2022 07:10 PM PST Most founders, myself included, have shit mental health. We cope through success: either by recognition from peers, or with money. Until we are successful, we devote our lives towards attaining success--most of the time, not for the money nor the reputation, but simply because we want some measure to prove ourselves with. Many factors exacerbate these feelings--pressure from investors, success of peers, social media, etc--and are even encouraged. Investors want their returns quickly, and you do have a legal responsibility to make an effort to bring these returns. Your peers are posting on LinkedIn about the hours they worked each week to raise their latest Series ABCDEFG. A large allure factor of accelerators that they advertise is that you're part of a "community of hustle" that pressures you to work harder and dedicate yourself to the project. YC even tells their founders to "call everyone we know and tell them to leave us alone for the next 3 months," to focus solely on the startup. The most successful startups have went to and graduated from YCombinator. This "hustle mindset" is probably the way to make a multi-billion dollar company. There are likely many sacrifices, personal and professional, that one needs to make to get to the revered unicorn status. I think it's apparent, though, that none of this encouragement and none of this pressure is healthy for a founder, a founders' friends, and a founders' family. (Not to disparage on YC. I love their program, just offering the nearest example that comes to mind). It is not healthy to work 16 hours a week. It's not healthy to feel like your startup's success is an analog to your own personal reputation. It's not healthy to relinquish your relationships just for the endless search of success. But I know that we all know this. It's a sacrifice that we make for that dream, be that a dream of wealth, a dream of recognition, a dream of vindication, or even just a dream of concluding. Doing a startup has been the worst thing to happen to my mental health. I still love it, and I still do it. I am just now recognizing that there are things to worry about outside the startup, and the path that I have been on has been completely unhealthy for my own health and the health of the company. There's no denying that this has been the most anxiety-inducing, pressure-filled, rewarding journey of my life. I feel successful in my startup. I am 19 years old, have a product I'm proud of, and raised a good amount of money. I just don't feel happy or accomplished in any other sector of my life, and that's a big problem. I barely have hobbies. I don't spend enough time on my family or friends as I should, let alone strengthening my relationship with my cofounder. I don't even have my driver's license yet, as I thought that sacrificing an hour a day to practice driving just wasn't worth it. By following the 16-hour hustle blueprint, I pigeonholed myself into only working on my startup, and thus, tying my entire life and emotions into the success of this likely-to-fail venture. (Even now, I feel like I have to qualify myself by mentioning my successes. Why do I feel like I need some modicum of success to feel valid in my mental struggles?) I've done some things to improve, like halving my work week, finding new hobbies, and going on more dates and outings. But there's a long way to go, and I don't feel healthy enough to give any pointers. I share this post not to give advice or warn anyone, but to share my experience of following the social pressures put on me as a startup founder, and hopefully to help someone else feel heard in their struggles as well. tl;dr working a lot is bad [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 05 Jan 2022 11:08 PM PST I'm a senior at my high school and I'm about to start college. I have a ton of stuff that I need to invest like my new car, college, and I'm even thinking about investing into possible things like NFTs, Stocks, and possibly other stuff. I'm thinking of making some extra side cash and I've thought about a baking goods service. I'll keep it small and somewhat relaxed little side business. I'll sell chocolate chip cookies, peanut butter cookies, and my sisters amazing moist brownies. I just a need some insight and would like to know what y'all think? [link] [comments] |
| Business partner wants me to sell back half my equity to pitch business to investors Posted: 04 Jan 2022 08:00 PM PST Got a question here, I've got a startup that sells climbing gear. I have a business connection that allowed us to acquire the inventory for a fraction of the wholesale price (worth about 250k retail, paid 40k). Recently, my business partner has told me that I need to sell back half my equity (for nothing) so he can pitch the business to investors by giving them the equity I sold back. Is this a common thing? I figured that if we get investors onboard we can transfer our own equity rather then having it floating around in the business, or is it there a reason to pitch the business with non-vested equity? [link] [comments] |
| How to handle sales guy who doesn't want commission but instead equity Posted: 05 Jan 2022 06:44 AM PST Hi all, I'm starting a B2B business and while my connections within the industry are good, presumably this guy's are better and he wants to be part of the sales team. I would love to have him and incentivize him based on commission, but I'm less convinced that giving him equity is worth it, given that I have done basically everything but pitch to clients thus far (built the product, founded the company, run the accounting, etc). How do I best structure this so that all of our incentives are aligned? Has anyone dealt with something similar? [link] [comments] |
| Educate me regarding taking a prototype to production Posted: 05 Jan 2022 02:40 PM PST Hello everyone, I need some information on what to do about making a prototype into production. All the prototypes for my product have been run on raspberry 3b+ and put together with random cases and tapes. What I need to know is what do I do, where do I go to make this product into a custom design in-terms of custom OEM SBC(Computer), custom case maybe even 3d printed etc. My skills are in software and I can also do design but engineering is not my forte. Learning that as I build this product. If anyone knows any companies or anything I can read, this would help a lot. I found few things but I don't even know what keywords to search for. Take for example, the ring doorbell, how did they get their custom camera, their custom case and custom sbc or microcontroller. This is what I am looking for. Thanks in advance : ). [link] [comments] |
| What’s the procedure of redirecting payment from one user to another? Posted: 05 Jan 2022 09:15 AM PST My app provides an option for users (businesses) to sell their products to customers. What's the procedure of charging the customer, and then send the payment to the business. Do I have to receive the money, or they can pay the business directly? What legal requirements this has? (UK) [link] [comments] |
| Narrowing the scope of target users Posted: 04 Jan 2022 02:58 PM PST Hey everyone, I'm sure some other people have had this issue before: you've come up with a good idea, and you think it would be useful to a massive group of people (for me, this is most office workers). This group is so large and diverse that conducting that initial idea validation stage seems impossible because the 'place they hang out' could be literally anywhere. If you had an idea which you thought could be useful to everyone, how did you narrow down your product and ideal customer to get useful feedback? Did you focus on a specific feature of your product first? [link] [comments] |
| How to progress with a possibly failed startup? Posted: 04 Jan 2022 04:01 PM PST Warning long post In March of 2021, I had the idea for a SaaS for landlords to better deal with their tenants and integrate with their existing tenant management software. The idea was a chat service at its core. In April 2021 I started building it and within 2 months the MVP was finished - took 2 months because I did a lot of performance testing on the socket server since I had never dealt with sockets before and was scared 10 users would kill it. Turns out I built it semi-well and can support a good load. Before building it I reached out to my network for people I knew were landlords that had 10+ units (wanted property managers too but didn't know any) and got input on the idea and also if it solved a pain point for them. I then spent 4 days of 6 hours outside different classes of apartment buildings - 1 shitty area, 1 okay area, 1 good area, and the highest cost for a 1 bedroom I could find in my city of 120k people. Tenants gave their input and said it would be nice to not need to use email but instead use an app or even text messaging (I plan to add this later but I am not sure of details yet). The feedback from them was that having it feel like a normal method of communication they are used to would be better. Most of them said their emails were full of spam and they missed messages from their landlord in the past 12 months. I then spent the next 5 months working to try and get my first paying customer. During this time I also worked on developing more as well in a 50/50 split of my time. My main reason for continuing development was that I was doing a major change of the auth service from AWS Cognito to Auth0 since I had run into some issues with Cognito and Auth0 fixed them. It seemed like a smart idea to try and do it while I had no or limited users so the migration would be less shitty to do. All users would have had to request a password reset because I had no access to passwords to transfer over -as it should be. Also, the migration would have likely caused some downtime which I am glad I avoided. I had the idea of trying to get funding to allow me to hire an SDR/BDR since that is the part of the sales cycle I suck at most and was having no luck with on responses. I started on a pitch deck and while I have it finished, I feel it sucks. The only 2 people in my network who have raised funds before, however, they are not people I talk to ever they were just the founders at a startup I worked at. I don't want to share my pitch deck publicly because it has some stuff I don't really want public and I rather not share my company name with say Reddit or Facebook. I have the pitch deck but am unsure if I should even try to raise considering I have a product (created from research) and I just need to sell it but can't get past the first customer which I suspect seed funds would like to see me at least get that myself. I have good experience leading people before in both work (5-10 people) and cadets (up to 100 people) when I was a teen. I know how to lead well (I think) and think that having an SDR/BDR would not be too hard for me if I had funding. I thought about maybe saving up to pay an SDR/BDR a small base salary with a high commission for booked demos instead of trying for funding. I am making this post to see maybe if I can get some input into things and give me direction. My annual thinking session (Dec26-Dec30) left me good with most of my life but with the business it left me wondering what is going wrong and why can't I get this to work. I posted not long ago about feeling burnt out and that was a combo of life/work and business. I think I am past that enough to where I can get some work done but I am not sure how to make the business successful. Do I keep trying to get my first customer myself then a few more till I can afford someone to help with sales or do I try and get funding so I can hire someone to help with sales? Sales and marketing are the two parts of the business that I suck at the most. They are why all of my previous attempts failed. I know I need to improve on them but no matter what I try it doesn't click. I have been following /r/sales for about 2 years now and learned a ton which has gotten me some results but not enough to matter or that I can't just put to luck. I know most people will say go back to those who I interviewed to see if they will be my first customers and I have tried. I got told by every one of them that I need an integration with their tenant management software. They all are different and when I looked into it, it is a huge task for me since I am a single dev and don't think I can make an integration in a reasonable amount of time. Where do I go from here? I'm at a loss what to do and it's left me spending the last 2 days just debating what I should do and how to do it. Thanks for reading my wall of text [link] [comments] |
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