Any stories of employees with equity successfully taking home over $1m? $500k?

Re:Any stories of employees with equity successfully taking ... by honestfeedback on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @02:10PM (#9227472)

I spent ~3 years at Twitter (2010-2013) as an engineer and manager. Made a competitive salary while there. Left with almost $2m in equity (ISOs + RSUs).

I sold the bulk of my position quickly due to serious concerns about tying the bulk of my net worth to a single company's future.

After strike price, AMT, and income tax I ended up with roughly $1m in cash. Probably could have been closer to $1.2m if I knew what I was doing tax-wise.

Not a reproducible pattern to be sure, but it was a nice outcome.

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Re:Any stories of employees with equity successfully taking ... by BadCookie on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @02:42PM (#9227738)

Stories like this one make me feel foolish. I recall not applying to Twitter in 2008 partly because I thought that they were already too successful and famous for the equity to be worth much. Clearly, I was mistaken. (It is a small comfort that I probably would not have received an offer anyway, due to my skills and experience level not being a great match for the open positions that they had at that time.)

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Re:Any stories of employees with equity successfully taking ... by gdix on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @03:20PM (#9228027)

Hindsight is 20/20. I thought I had missed the boat in 2007 when Facebook was valued at $500 million. "Clearly they couldn't go much higher than that!" I thought.

I have a friend who got an offer from a startup in 2011 w/ 0.15% equity. He didn't take the offer. The company was WhatsApp and his equity would have been worth $27 million.

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Re:Any stories of employees with equity successfully taking ... by arasmussen on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @03:19PM (#9228018)

Go work at Uber :P

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Re:Any stories of employees with equity successfully taking ... by citizens on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @05:52PM (#9228937)

According to their angel.co page, they are not offering equity: https://angel.co/uber/jobs/

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Re:Any stories of employees with equity successfully taking ... by arkem on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @10:20PM (#9229885)

I don't know if they're offering equity at the moment but they were offering it to engineers 18 months ago.

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Re:Any stories of employees with equity successfully taking ... by foobarqux on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @03:16PM (#9227999)

Why did you leave?

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Re:Any stories of employees with equity successfully taking ... by honestfeedback on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @03:23PM (#9228052)

My reasons for leaving were 100% personal. Financially I would have been much, much better off staying for at least another 2-3 years.

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Re:Any stories of employees with equity successfully taking ... by foobarqux on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @04:51PM (#9228612)

When you say personal do you mean unrelated to your work?

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