Re:The Unicorns Fell into a Ditch
by ChuckMcM on Monday May 18, 2020 @07:22PM
(#23229545)
I have since come to the conclusion that I was both right and wrong.
If you analyze the meta-branching of that decision you can see at least three branches.
1) The one I took which was to stay at Sun. In this universe my employee purchase options continued to grow, Sun's stock split again, and my net worth grew by more than my annual salary that year.
2) In this first alternate, I take the job at Netscape in May of 1995, and become a multi-millionaire (on paper) in August. Using historical data for Netscape, and knowing that when they went public they had a 1 year lockout on employee sales, if I were to have sold 1/4th of my option on the anniversary of the IPO in each of 1996, 1997, 1997, and 1998, my net worth would go up to roughly $9.8M net of income taxes assuming I didn't file an 83b election (not that I could of come up with the cash to vest all my shares anyway at that time but whatever)
3) I take the job at Netscape, I am holding multiple millions of dollars in stock which become AOL stock in 1998 and don't sell them, they become nearly worthless 5 years later.
The illustration is that there is a path and different choices along the path end in different endings.
As it turned out, after Netscape went public, realizing that I was not going to make a whole lot of money on Sun stock as an employee, I left and started a startup with some other ex-Sun employees.
My take away from all of this was that decisions are neither "right" nor "wrong", rather they are just inflections in the timeline. Sometimes the timeline has given you additional advantage, and sometimes it has taken it away, the trick for me was to not get greedy. When there was "enough" advantage, lock in the benefit and move on, when there was "enough" disadvantage, stop digging the hole and move on. But most importantly for my mental health, as long as the slope was generally on the upswing, then don't sweat the choices that didn't work out.
With all that being said, I'm also a big fan of learning from decisions and trying to put into my toolkit things that would have illuminated the upside and downside more clearly if I had done them at the time. Case in point, "Never join a startup where the two senior leaders are both in a relationship and their reporting relationship at home is different than the one they have at work." and "Never join a startup that has never had to defend its existence to a skeptical investor."
If you analyze the meta-branching of that decision you can see at least three branches.
1) The one I took which was to stay at Sun. In this universe my employee purchase options continued to grow, Sun's stock split again, and my net worth grew by more than my annual salary that year.
2) In this first alternate, I take the job at Netscape in May of 1995, and become a multi-millionaire (on paper) in August. Using historical data for Netscape, and knowing that when they went public they had a 1 year lockout on employee sales, if I were to have sold 1/4th of my option on the anniversary of the IPO in each of 1996, 1997, 1997, and 1998, my net worth would go up to roughly $9.8M net of income taxes assuming I didn't file an 83b election (not that I could of come up with the cash to vest all my shares anyway at that time but whatever)
3) I take the job at Netscape, I am holding multiple millions of dollars in stock which become AOL stock in 1998 and don't sell them, they become nearly worthless 5 years later.
The illustration is that there is a path and different choices along the path end in different endings.
As it turned out, after Netscape went public, realizing that I was not going to make a whole lot of money on Sun stock as an employee, I left and started a startup with some other ex-Sun employees.
My take away from all of this was that decisions are neither "right" nor "wrong", rather they are just inflections in the timeline. Sometimes the timeline has given you additional advantage, and sometimes it has taken it away, the trick for me was to not get greedy. When there was "enough" advantage, lock in the benefit and move on, when there was "enough" disadvantage, stop digging the hole and move on. But most importantly for my mental health, as long as the slope was generally on the upswing, then don't sweat the choices that didn't work out.
With all that being said, I'm also a big fan of learning from decisions and trying to put into my toolkit things that would have illuminated the upside and downside more clearly if I had done them at the time. Case in point, "Never join a startup where the two senior leaders are both in a relationship and their reporting relationship at home is different than the one they have at work." and "Never join a startup that has never had to defend its existence to a skeptical investor."