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A comment on LivingSocial: Employees' and Founders' Common Stock Now Worthless. Parent comment

Re:LivingSocial: Employees' and Founders' Common Stock Now W... by acheron on Thursday February 21, 2013 @08:06AM (#5257134)
"1. Take the least amount of stock possible is not a good generally-applicable rule. It might have worked for you in the past, but it sure wouldn't have worked well for any of the employees of Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Weebly, etc."

And for the people who won the Powerball, "Don't buy lottery tickets" wouldn't have worked well for them. That doesn't mean "Don't buy lottery tickets" isn't a good generally-applicable rule.

Cashing out big on your startup might not be quite as rare as winning the Powerball, but it's still awfully unlikely.

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Re:LivingSocial: Employees' and Founders' Common Stock Now W... by drusenko on Thursday February 21, 2013 @11:11AM (#5258205)
We're talking maybe 1 in 50 versus 1 in 175,000,000 so yes, the comparison to the lottery is useless.
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Re:LivingSocial: Employees' and Founders' Common Stock Now W... by baak on Thursday February 21, 2013 @02:07PM (#5259378)
1 in 50 seems... very, very optimistic. On top of that, the investment is higher than the lottery. The lottery costs you $1. This costs you ~$10-20k in salary, and possibly more in lost opportunities and time you would've had elsewhere.
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Re:LivingSocial: Employees' and Founders' Common Stock Now W... by drusenko on Thursday February 21, 2013 @09:22PM (#5262123)
Not at all. From my comment above:

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Since there's a lot of assertion and not much data here, let's bring some in. After some quick research, this Quora article seemed to have some useful statistics: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-truth-behind-9-out-of-10-st...

In short, 13% of VC-backed startups exit for over $10M, 5% exit for over $50M, and 2% exit for over $100M, which is what I'd call significant.

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Besides, there are a lot of startup opportunities that pay market, so you aren't "investing" anything in the equity, it's a bonus over what you'd get paid elsewhere.

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Re:LivingSocial: Employees' and Founders' Common Stock Now W... by whazzmaster on Thursday February 21, 2013 @12:37PM (#5258718)
Cashing out big is a 1 in 50 proposition? Wow! Source?
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