Re:Dropbox Files Confidentially for U.S. IPO
by bogomipz on Thursday January 11, 2018 @03:05PM
(#16127309)
>"Well, true, and the meta-point that I hope is coming across through my comment is that you should evaluate each opportunity according to the specific terms in front of you and your assessment of how likely the organization is to succeed in your future"
Yes of course that is just common sense and there is nothing in my comment that suggests you shouldn't apply common sense.
>"Nobody on an Internet forum can do that for you"
Well of course not and I was not attempting to advocate for someone else. I thought this was implicit when I stated "I think ..."
But the point I wanted to make, bringing up the Google example, is that I didn't expect Google stock to have much upside in 2009. Most people didn't expect Google stock to have much upside in 2009. Google stock still had much upside. The excitement was all in Web 2.0 startups (like zillions of other people, I founded one), but most of them had little success. We're talking about Dropbox now, but Dropbox was a desktop app startup, perhaps the one thing less cool than a big tech company in 2008.
Similarly, the common wisdom now is that startups are a losing bet and you should go ask for cash at an established company that can pay you well. Usually, in markets, when something becomes common wisdom it ceases to be true. So I will happily take the opposite side of that trade - I'm back to founding a startup, I work for equity, and if people want cash, I'll pay them in cash. I realize that I'm making a risk/reward tradeoff here and there's a fairly decent chance my equity will be worthless, but I choose to make it anyway, because I believe that at this point in time, the startup career path is undervalued.