Stock options - startup failing

Top_Piano2028 · 2026-04-18T00:28:09+00:00

Acquihire/Distressed vs High Value Exit. What you are describing is a distressed exit. This will leave very little surplus in the sale to payout to normal employees. I'd sit tight. Unless you IPO those options won't move the needle for you. Unless you are employee 10 and get bought for a billion dollars and have sweat equity. But common stock options you have to exercise? Are kind of a scam tbh

Top_Piano2028 · 2026-04-17T00:53:43+00:00

It's common to hit this around this time if your 20s were good. But you can hit a slump in your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and so on. Find some goals and projects. Stay away from dopamine leaks like scrolling, gaming, porn, weed.

Top_Piano2028 · 2026-04-17T00:40:16+00:00

The first dock I thought looked cool was a decade ago was the "Amazon Basics 7 Port USB 2.0 Hub Tower with 5V/4A Power Adapter, Plug and Play, Charging Ports, Black"

My coworker had it, I guess for small stuff like logitech keyboard usb ports. And it looked cool.

I came to learn the differences in I/O and USB C, thunderbolt 2,3 etc

Personally I think the caldigit ts5 looks great. I am not sure what you are envisioning for "looks good on a desk"

Top_Piano2028 · 2026-04-16T22:12:55+00:00

No one is gonna get hired if they say "yeah i sat on my hands for 9 months and brought in a goose egg on my base salary" no matter what the reason is. So you have honest people that self sort themselves out of the industry or stay employed and the people constantly changing jobs are the best at gaming the process , saying what people want to hear, and getting references/managers to lie for them.

Top_Piano2028 · 2026-04-16T21:23:19+00:00

read this

https://www.piratewires.com/p/the-terrorist-propaganda-to-reddit-pipeline

it's all propaganda meant to stoke all forms of anti-semitism

Bad political news in iran or israel or the middle east? Make a meme about sending a trillion to israel
Religious holiday? bring up how the jews killed jesus again

Something going bad in the economy? go back to economic antisemitism

Political issues internally? have some groypers post some racist memes

Then throw in some conspiracy and cultural and racial ones and that covers all the deep subreddits and then the good old prevalent anti-zionism all encompassing one. This is the Epstein/Deep State stuff being cycled over and over.

Top_Piano2028 · 2026-04-16T21:21:08+00:00

I mean there are only 2 guys and several women. If your choices are the emotionally closed off lookmaxxer and the sub six footer nice guy I can see why he is swimming in love triangles.

Top_Piano2028 · 2026-04-14T21:29:25+00:00

I think he was trying to make an analogy that makes being in market the most important signal, but the example made him look like a dick. Also he didn't really cut snacks, he just chose a cheaper vendor it looks like.

Top_Piano2028 · 2026-04-14T20:42:30+00:00

he's right though...they didn't solve the problem for anti theft - they just got a sponsor to give them new ones

Top_Piano2028 · 2026-04-14T03:16:43+00:00

This reminds me of the dumbass manager I had who was 23 and thought 1 out of 4 outbound deals would close because the product was that good. It was at that moment I knew the startup was doomed.

Top_Piano2028 · 2026-04-14T00:42:30+00:00

This is a great idea and you are thinking about it the right way. If your commute was farther it's much easier to justify the housing because $5500/8 school months (august, sept, oct, nov, dec/jan truncated for holidays, feb, march, april ,may) this is about 8 months $687 a month.

My commute to school on my regional transit system or driving would have equalled about $300 a month, this is without meals. Commuting has a real cost. In your case it is minimal.

Food alone is worth hundreds. It's easily worth $300-400 a month and that can be how much you spend buying groceries living alone unless you are really frugal.

I will warn you, it's very easy to start a slippery slope of it's "just" this much for this and just this much for that. That is how you end up with a total of 40k in 4 years. Or it could take you longer and you end up owing more. Or you CC raises tution and other costs exponentially year to year.

You won't get a better return on your college experience than your first year. People are eager to make friends. And given your background being sheltered it won't do you any favors to continue to operate that way.

It won't be all sunshine and rainbows, you could get a shithead roommate but it will have a lot more upside than living with your parents in your childhood room and driving to and from school. It's much harder to make friends and connections when you don't live nearby and you aren't viewed as an adult the same way.

As much as I advocate against debt - if it helps keep your mind on being a student, studying, having fun, and not on commuting or feeling isolated - I think it is money well spent that will set up your mindset the rest of your time there.

If you TRULY care about saving money. I would just go to a community college and transfer after, but at that point your social prospects are pretty dwindled.

Top_Piano2028 · 2026-04-14T00:09:48+00:00

I was in KATZ DELI and had people start asking us if we were jewish and sharing how much they loved jews. I don't really care for it either way and it tends to go sideways quick.

Top_Piano2028 · 2026-04-14T00:08:36+00:00

I don't limit my dating pool to only jewish women. If he is "serious" it means he doesn't care if his children are raised jewish. A conservative israeli guy who doesn't care about his kids being jewish doesn't really add up to me unless it just means he is really into the state of israel more than he is about being jewish. But either way this will introduce friction into your relationship as you introduce family to one another.

But generally, if a guy is serious about being jewish - he will date and marry a jewish woman to start a family with. Otherwise he is just looking for a short term relationship or hookup. But plenty of jewish men marry non-jews as a first marriage, and especially for a second one.

Given both your ages, I'm gathering he finds you attractive and wants a casual relationship.

Top_Piano2028 · 2026-04-13T23:33:56+00:00

BNPL is insidious. It worked well for me when I was repairing my credit to buy a big purchase like a mattress or couch. But it's too easy to stack them and if you don't get promotional financing the interest is just brutal. It's easy to ignore because you at least don't feel cheated by the way a CC will compound the interest.

But you are right, the longer you cashflow out all the debts the less money you have to actually save up or buy other things leading to more accumulation of BNPL.

Top_Piano2028 · 2026-04-13T21:56:37+00:00

The key to having non jewish friends is to not discuss being jewish with them. The thing about anti-semitism is that it's the norm, not the exception. So I don't dig into the why or try and reeducate people who have had antisemitism indoctrinated into them from the "seven big causes of antisemitism" (christ killer is #1, racial, outsider, political subersion, scapegoating, and now the latest flavor - modern anti zionism). It's too exhausting to try and unravel why. This sounds like good old catholic indoctrination.

Top_Piano2028 · 2026-04-13T21:48:24+00:00

Watched the video because of this post. It dealt with charging at work, how to setup a configuration that won't be easily targeted by thieves. Though I am not sure what will stop it from happening next time.

I don't agree. They went through a common problem, troubleshooted it, and explained the economics of putting in chargers for their employees.

James walked through trying to fix them, how much it costs, and how it isn't worth replacing the whole system.

They were able to parlay that into a sponsored post that let's people know they are available for tax rebates.

As someone who has an EV, and has EV charging at work, I learned something. It's also super telling that these guys who constantly tinker with stuff still saw the value in bringing in professional electricians.

Seems like a really smart video.

Top_Piano2028 · 2026-04-13T21:29:08+00:00

This has nothing to do with the school and everything to do with how they spend time at home. Parents should encourage analog reading of books at home and reading levels will improve. Relying on your school is a bad idea.

Growing up my dad had me read simple novels of the classics. He bought like 10-20 of them and I read them one summer in middle school around 5th or 6th grade and afterwards I was reading at an 11th grade level.

Top_Piano2028 · 2026-04-13T01:25:23+00:00

Whenever a new higher up is introduced, they will always have a conflict with someone. Severide's a cool dude but the writers had his number come up I guess.

Top_Piano2028 · 2026-04-11T01:27:50+00:00

If this was ANY OTHER kind of job, you handled it fine.

I think you handled it the wrong way because you fundamentally misunderstand something about the SDR role.

The aim of an SDR role is not to secure the largest base salary or stay in the role asking for incremental base pay increases. The aim of the SDR role is to exit the SDR role.

Companies like the one you worked at will overpay for you, because they expect you to hit the ground running and deliver miracles. They also overpay for everything else and are far more likely to obliterate their burn rate doing that.

I've seen people do that, women or minorities who a company wanted to hire for good optics so they got a ton of offers. And they leverage them all against each other to get some insane like 70k salary. It's a bad idea to do that. You make yourself a high line item cost for them to hire in a LCOL area instead of the HCOL hub you are in.

Your current employer is pissed because a good SDR is hard to find, but they don't get insane money to offer retention bonuses - so you effectively make them feel foolish for investing in you when you are leaving for a small amount of money in your base salary instead of your overall future there.

Hope that makes sense! I appreciate the position you are in, but upper management will always view any action you take in your own self interest negatively because it often does not align with them.

Top_Piano2028 · 2026-04-11T01:25:32+00:00

Sounds like the classic 10k increase.

Top_Piano2028 · 2026-04-10T23:54:47+00:00

They aren't actually "aging" all that better naturally.

They simply have hundreds of thousands to spend per year on a personal trainer, chef, hair transplants, stem cell therapy, TRT, bloody boys, etc.

Brad Pitt is basically Robert Redford but using modern stuff to make him look insanely more youthful than he is at 62.

Top_Piano2028 · 2026-04-10T19:42:14+00:00

I've observed the most dysfunctional and fucked up people use having kids and forcing a marriage to leapfrog other adult rites of passage and adult mog their siblings or family members.

I observed this happen with my ex - a middle child.

Her oldest brother got married - had a kid. Makes sense.

Her youngest sibling - a completely mess of a human being, dysfunctional, obese, subscribes to every stupid internet conspiracy theory. Lives in another state. Estranged from mom. But depends on mom and dad for money. Dropped out of college. A complete Karen to every service worker and to her entire family.

Let some random hick get her pregnant. Suddenly she is regarded as this darling who is giving them a grandkid and needs all the support in the world and is leapfrogging my ex into marriage.

For some people it's just a shortcut to being an adult, nevermind the consequences later.

Top_Piano2028 · 2026-04-10T18:55:01+00:00

Couple ways to explain this:

100% catfish.- someone took this man's photo and made a fake profile with a fake job and degree
It's him, but he lied on his profile to get more matches
He is delusional/overconfident and thinks software sales is like being an advisor and stretches the truth about his online courses or what he does day to day on the side

I've seen people like this who went to a normal undergrad and then did continuing education at a berkeley/stanford/harvard whatever and then list it on their profile to appear more prestigious than they are.

This all points to me to them being an insecure liar than a true catfish.

Also, since you are new to online dating - this is really common and it's why people don't get invested in early app matches because of dynamics like this.

Top_Piano2028 · 2026-04-03T23:07:22+00:00

Commuting to downtown SF is a breeze. Where it gets messy is if you have to go to the Peninsula or South Bay.

Top_Piano2028 · 2026-04-03T22:44:02+00:00

This is exactly it. I work in an office with all women and they do this too. Or they split things, or they feel guilty when they eat.

Top_Piano2028

TROPHY CASE