Re:There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”
by dhosek on Thursday February 18, 2021 @12:21PM
(#26182640)
I have never had a stock option that was worth as much as a penny in the course of my career. In one case, a “can't lose” employee stock purchase program (where you put aside money for purchase and at the end of the year you would get stock bought at the lower of the price at the beginning and end of the purchase period with a 10% discount on top of that) ended up being a loss because the stock dropped 50% between the purchase of shares and delivery of the shares. The company was eventually bought out by 3M and I got a hundred bucks or so out of my initial investment (which was, thankfully only a thousand or two, if I recall correctly).
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Re:There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”
by laurent92 on Thursday February 18, 2021 @05:11PM
(#26186419)
A company sold for 3 million is... I mean, in average, I see that the worth is about 1m$ per employee. If you sold for less, your stock performed poorly compared to others. Maybe the product or the engineering was great, but on the wrong market or never met its window. Business is difficult.
The question is, would you have had excellent returns if the company had been worth $1m per employee?
Re:There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”
by Cd00d on Thursday February 18, 2021 @09:51PM
(#26189010)
I think OP was saying the company 3M bought the startup. Not that the startup was sold for $3mm.
Re:There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”
by saalweachter on Saturday February 20, 2021 @09:54AM
(#26204492)
In addition to the $3m/3M confusion, don't forget preferential liquidation.
If you own 10% of a company and it sells for 2x the invested value, you might get < 5% of the sale price yourself once the investors are taken care of.