You're right; nobody would want options. So we have to start paying people in actual shares if we want to give equity. Which means you have to give employees way more of the company than deep-pocketed investment bankers who will still invest -- despite their temper tantrums to the contrary -- because there are very few companies that can absorb a nine-to-ten figure investment and do something productive with it.
Just because the system as it exists right now would be destroyed doesn't make this a bad change. The system right now is overly complicated, leads to workers abandoning in-the-money options or staying at a job they hate, and is heavily slanted towards early employees.
But the current model of venture financing is largely dead regardless of whether this change goes through. It's already being replaced by cryptocurrencies / ICOs, which seem like a far more sensible method of issuing restricted stock in excess of the SEC's limitations (since the right crypto / wallet scheme for something like this would not be anonymous). I think ultimately, cryptocurrencies are going to replace RSUs, but the cryptocurrencies that replace RSUs will probably have many of the same governance restrictions as RSUs.
How we treat them for tax purposes is a different problem, but it should make the RSU liquidity problem less troublesome (e.g. you can sell some of your crypto-RSUs back to the company in exchange for ETH/BTC, then convert back to USD and pay your taxes).
People wouldn't want that either; they'd still have to pay tax on shares that were, for practical purposes, worthless at time of issue (and time tax due) and would statistically probably always be worthless.
Under this system, you'd really have to abandon compensation with stock of any sort for non-publicly traded entities.
In any case, the market would be far more liquid. I'm not a huge fan of cryptocurrencies for personal use, but I absolutely think they're going to take over the world when it comes to the money used in investment finance (which is ~99% of the money on Earth).
Valuations would be artificially low if that were the case.
Right now, most post-money valuations are artificially high, which has its own set of problems. These companies are being valued as if they had already accomplished their objectives, and it’s solely because the lack of liquidity allows (and after several rounds of funding, requires) VCs to obfuscate reality and get big valuations that drive big headlines which become self-reinforcing.
In any case, it’s all speculative now, but in 2 years I bet we have this all figured out; and the regulators will probably catch up a few years after Trump is gone. Cryptocurrency has hit the critical inflection point where big banks are building platforms around blockchain. It’s not like this stuff isn’t already core business for Goldman et al.
So what real change do cryptocurrencies bring here?
Making stocks more liquid early on is the last things startups want; if they effectively become publicly traded, the SEC is going to push for a great deal of transparency that will be at least expensive and possibly harmful.
Is this true? I thought (perhaps incorrectly, naively) that one of the whole points of private equity being locked down and unable to sell/liquidate was just that - so that it can't be sold/liquidated. Any solution that makes it liquid goes against one of the original purposes, and thus isn't likely to happen.
This is also a big gamble if you're given shares in a non-public company. You pay taxes on these shares at vesting - not only have you reduced your liquidity until IPO/exit, but these shares could end up being worth nothing if the company fails.
Does anyone have data on the number/size of round A funding events vs ICO funding? I have a suspicion we're seeing a transfer from one into the other.
https://www.crunchbase.com/lists/recent-funding-rounds/f535c...
And those are mostly just rounds raised today.
Deferred compensation plans are something else entirely; they're a way to say "hold back part of my salary and invest it in a 401k-like thing, and give it to me later". (Such plans are non-qualified and not backed by anything other than the credit of the company, unlike a 401k, so not something you want to do if you have any doubts in future solvency.)
This clause wasn’t in the House version of the bill. Call your senator.
The majority of HN readers are going to see a net increase in taxation, to fund giveaways to the GOP's donor class.
The bill gets rid of AMT, which many HN readers have been hit by, thus helping them. It also increases the standard deduction, which helps lower income people much more than higher income people.
I don't like the plan because I pay more under it, but the value of the giveaways to the very rich seem rather small compared to low income benefits. Lowering of the corporate income tax rate and axing the mortgage interest deduction has broad support from economists across the political spectrum too.
NPR had an interesting piece on this in 2012:
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-...
Edit, great chart showing who pays more / less: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/here-are-the-winners-and-l...
Good article from Pew Research on this: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/07/employment-v...
"As many observers have pointed out, the official unemployment definition leaves out some significant groups. The underemployed – part-time workers who would prefer to work full-time – are counted among the employed. And discouraged workers – people who’d like a job but have stopped looking because they don’t believe any work is available – aren’t counted as part of the labor force at all."
In this case, it also gives a fair number of people a bigger tax headache. In some cases, taxing earlier may mean future gains become capital gains when they may have been ordinary income; that's not good for tax revenue, even if you get some of it sooner.
It stands to reason that they recognized NSOs/ISOs being used heavily (perhaps more than anyone else) by tech firms but this just seems like a recognition that wealth taxation woefully needs reform. The estate tax is being retired so this seems to balance it out.
So taxes on people that work for a living are raised to pay for eliminating the estate tax multi-millionaires?
IMO it's not partisan, it's just business.
further, this already happened once with AMT and Dotcom 1.0, leaving a bunch of rank and files with huge tax bills for profits they never actually reaped.
equity compensation has plenty of risks, which is why the timing of taxes gets complicated. the value of the underlying asset needs to solidify enough (meaning there is a liquid enough market for the equities) that it can be (partially) liquidated and used to pay the tax. but the variance in the liquidity over time is so high that it's nearly impossible to properly predict when the tax man should come knocking on the door.
In fact, you could, in theory, bankrupt someone by giving them enough shares.
I think they may have changed this for small enough companies, but still, it's a bad thing aimed at taxing middle classes not the rich. The rich don't earn shares as part of payroll, I imagine.
In Australia or the US? Because they do in the US.
I mean knowing "many" is different than that being the majority of the cases, and I would strongly dispute that working at a startup is a "low risk" way of achieving some huge financial upside. I in fact remember seeing on Hacker news a few months back (I'll see if I can find it) a study that basically stated that in the aggregate employee stock options at startups aren't worth the risk.
Unless it goes bankrupt or has some other issue and you don't get paid or get fired.
I do not like this idea that startup employees aren't taking a risk. It encourages extremely one sided behavior.
They already are mostly unable to compete with larger companies on total compensation. Startup equity is worthless unless you win the lottery.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astro...
> Jeez, we’ve had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I’m sorry. It seems like it should be. But it’s not.
No. Most companies give their employees ISOs, which arent affected by this bill. So it would actually be 0 change to the employees. What this affects is the investors or potentially the founders of a startup
In that case, it would meet that goal very well.
What a pity it is that the technical talent, who might prefer lucking into big piles of windfall cash by working for the right unicorn, has no big national organization to lobby in favor of our interests, and speak out against this type of change. (If you're one of the folks that knee-jerk downvotes any mention of tech worker unions, that's what I'm talking about, so let's get that click out of the way.)
As an aside, how many companies do you see actually building Snapchat for Etsy-linked tumblr posts? I see that criticism of Silicon Valley all the time, yet despite being in the heart of it I rarely see that kind of company. I’d guess an order of magnitude more money is going into building human transporting drones and supersonic jets than into the silly stuff people love to rail on the Valley for.
Look at the list of startups that just came out of YC and you’ll see maybe one or two companies that fit that kind of mockery.
By and large, taxation of options and RSU at any point will have negligible impact on the SMB sector of the US economy. It's probably very, very damaging for startups if your definition of startup matches Paul Graham's, but if your definition of startup is "new business that happens to use JavaScript for something" this is unlikely to change anything about your day to day competitiveness.
It hasn't loaned me its political power for anything that matters to me, and so for this issue that impacts me not at all, I will not be returning any favors.
The collapse of the 2002 bubble hurt everywhere else far more deeply than SV, with a more painful recovery, so I see anything that might curb irrationally exuberant investment in companies that are not likely to ever benefit rust belt economies as a good thing.
Furthermore, I am more in favor of simpler employee incentives that do not force people to invest where they work. At the income level of a typical tech employee outside of SV and NYC, any investments should likely be buy-and-ignore in a robot-managed index fund. I don't want all my net worth to be tied up in my employer, especially when we have no contract, no real control over its business strategy or tactics, and I can be fired at will. If you want to pay me $X, pay me $X.
But I don't get options or RSUs, or even cash bonuses. I get billed to a customer at $200-$400/hr and get maybe $50-$60 of that in total compensation. It's hard to tell, really, because my employers keep getting sold to other companies that proceed to change around the benefits plan. The details aren't very important. Those companies are getting a whole lot of money, and they are giving a smaller proportion of it to the leaf node workers, and a larger share to administration, management, business lubricators, and bureaucracy. The tech industry has very little political-economic clout outside of the handful of cities considered to be tech centers.
I'd love to have an alternative to that, beyond moving my family at least 500 miles away. Again. But that SV money is mostly staying in SV. It isn't going into helping out the industry in the rest of the country, or the rest of the world. It isn't spreading business opportunities to local economies outside of central California and the Pacific NW. SV has done little for me beyond offering me new things to buy. They have not given me the additional local economic activity that I'd need to buy them.
(That's not strictly true. SV has also exported business practices that get cargo-culted everywhere, usually to my detriment.)
I have zero reasons to support the small businesses of Silicon Valley. They can go piss up a tree, because even in a hurricane-force gale blowing directly east, it still won't land anywhere near me. I also won't ever be in a position where I'd actually be able to move there, and it seems the culture has an unnatural aversion to spreading itself somewhere else. So choke on it. SV is competitive with my local tech community, rather than cooperative, so crippling its startups and small businesses helps ours, even at the expense of a smaller overall tech economy. I'm fine with a smaller overall pie, if I get a bigger slice on my plate. I'd only care about bigger pie if there are bigger slices for everyone, not just the ones closest to the ovens.
So by all means, make options and RSUs untenable, and dry up the H1Bs, and let the major players collude with anti-poaching agreements, and let the NIMBYs drive up housing prices. I want Silicon Valley to fail, because in its success, it has been leaving me behind. It will take my money, but won't give it back by spending it in somewhere in my neighborhood. If the only way to claw that back is to vote it out of someone else pocket, so be it.
Edit: Besides that, it's a bit ironic that those working on defense systems like THAAD and Aegis and C-RAM and Iron Dome are largely out of range of North Korean missiles, while the NK propaganda videos depict the atomic destruction of San Francisco and all of its peacetime-tech startups. Pork barrel military-industrial spending might be wasteful, but it does spread the wealth to a lot of people who are otherwise completely ignored by the investment sector.
Bang on. I'm mostly glad that my particular corner of the Midwest doesn't seem terribly keen on aping the SV model of shitty business practices, at least. Small victories and all that.
Why? I'd much rather actually deliver something to the client, even if...
> I get billed to a customer at $200-$400/hr and get maybe $50-$60 of that in total compensation.
Then it sounds like everything else around what you deliver is worth at least $140-350/hr. If it's really so easy I'm sure you could offer your services for $100/hr, take a nice big raise and save your clients hundreds of thousands a year.
> it seems the culture has an unnatural aversion to spreading itself somewhere else
Because even for a culture that bitches and moans about how old school business ways are out dated, they still insist you be within a 2 hour drive of your investors, so that when Ashton Kutcher gets mad at someone he can yell at them in person instead of over ~~email~~ ~~hipchat~~ Slack.
> It will take my money, but won't give it back by spending it in somewhere in my neighborhood.
Stop buying shit from startups
Not everyone wants to, or is able to strike it out on their own.
I would need a non-technical co-founder that I could trust to not stab me in the back, and an investor willing to give us enough runway to take off without putting any land mines in it. So far, those conditions have never been met. Business around here is very often more about who you know than what you can do, and since I don't know the right people, those customers are simply unavailable, even at a deep discount to $100/hr.
All that overhead is necessary to navigate the system that has been set up to favor those that support the system. The bureaucratic hoops are insurmountable barriers to entry to individuals, and very steep even for a hypothetical small company that is 51% owned by a disabled Indian veteran woman. It wouldn't be much of a military-industrial complex if it could be disrupted that easily. The "clients" are far less interested in saving money than with preserving their influence over the nature of the work, an end often pursued by spending every penny of the allocated budget, regardless of need.
A union could change it. A U.S. attorney with a forensic accountant, TS/SCI security clearance, and a stack of subpoenas could change it. A political party could change it. A handful of generals and admirals could change it. One software pro, working alone? Not so much.
This is really the best deal I can get right now, without dropping everything and moving again. It isn't great, but it is available to me, and I don't have to front capital, work owner-manager hours, or do types of work that I am not comparatively good at doing.
Besides that, I have already failed at going it alone once, and once was all I could afford. I didn't make it, and lost everything. The work was good enough, but not enough people wanted to buy it, and not enough customers recommended it to their friends. So that runway is gone, and I'm stuck workin' for The Man until I can retire. In retrospect, I would have been far better off not trying. But that's all anecdotal. You might succeed on your own. Maybe I just didn't work hard enough.
You don't need to "front capital", or work special hours, or have a special clearance, jesus. Just don't live paycheck to paycheck and stash away a few months expenses while you do your thing. Thousands of professionals do this on a regular basis. IMHO employment is much more risky and cutthroat. You don't get to set your salary, end up with disadvantaged tax treatment, and half of your coworkers are focused on crawling up an artificial ladder instead of actually completing work on time.
The math works out. I, specifically, am better off as an employee. I already took my shot at self-employment and blew it. I won't get another. I'm lucky that I even got one.
If I still lived in an area with more potential customers, with more money, the story might be different. If I wasn't absolutely crap at sales and administration, the story might be different. If I were better able to build a network, such by being more attractive or having better social skills, the story might be different. If I weren't still paying off debts from the first time around, the story might be different. But it's not.
I'm not blaming bureaucracy. It's me. I cannot run my own business. I tried it once already, in the Chicago market, which should be plenty big enough for anyone with an iota of business ability, and it didn't work out. It was a dismal failure. Nobody wanted to hire me. Nobody wanted to refer me. I couldn't get the customers. Therefore, I must have zero business ability--not an iota; zero. If a bunch of money magically dropped into my lap to start a business, I would still have to hire someone else to get me customers. But without already having a customer, I could not afford to hire that person. Easier all around to just find a person that does that already and be their employee.
Do you understand this? Can you fathom how a person might have one valuable skill and be completely unable to exploit it alone? What would you say the difference would be between an aircraft designer that worked as an employee for Boeing or Airbus and one that sold mail-order kits to hobbyist pilots? The former has a whole bunch of people multiplying the value of their labor, and probably gets a smaller share of the gross revenue. The latter might get 75% of their sales, and still make less total.
Besides that, people don't like me. You may underestimate how important that is in the realm of economics. People prefer to give money to other people that they know and like, rather than the people they don't. I know there are loads of resources out there on how to get other people to like you, but it seems like they all rely on some secret sauce that I just don't have.
Throwing the baby out with the bathwater, if I've ever seen it.
I most definitely want to disincentivize startups that lure people that likely don't yet know any better to move to one of the highest cost-of-living markets in the world, to work long hours in exchange for empty promises and unicorn-lottery tickets. If you actually need top talent, you can pay for it with cash. If you can't get enough cash to pay for it, that might be because investors don't believe you can do what you say you can do, and they might be right.
There are plenty of startups that don't resort to flimflammery to attract employees, and many of them are forced to bootstrap on slim margins and angels because their model will never make them a unicorn, and certain types of investor are only attracted to the high-risk, high-reward ventures. That may be because the rules around the current system provide additional incentives to have that preference. Changing the rules might change the preference.
It is my personal preference that businesses that quietly fill a niche and make money from day 1 be preferred over those that burn their solid rocket booster at both ends, only to make big flashy explosions that do nothing and go nowhere. But I lack the funds and the risk tolerance to enforce my preference, so it doesn't really matter to the markets at all. But I still have one vote worth of political power, whenever that actually matters.
What's more happening is that talent is being attracted to mid-stage startups, unicorns, and the big companies like Google and Amazon. Early-stage startups like "Tinder for people with green hair" don't employ enough people across the market for them to significantly impact it.
I don't think this is about government fighting against stock-paying companies for tech workers by fucking up RSUs. In reality it's probably just government incompetence. No need for strawmanning or conspiracy
Anyone that has options at a company that grows quickly would be paying tens or hundreds of thousands in taxes to keep their equity, which is still effectively a very risky bet that a company will end up huge.
No one would want options anymore, which would make it impossible for startups to compete with large, cash-rich incumbents. That should be the last thing you want if your goal is for an economy to grow.