"If you want to hear a much better
outlet for capital funding, my start-up company is involved in
something called the XFL, which is sure to be the most successful enterprise of the decade."
So that would have cost < $1000 to exercise at the time. Amazon appears to have had 3 stock splits (2x, 3x, and 2x) in the intervening years. Current share price is > $1100 dollars. Meaning 709,000 orig shares * 12x from splits * $1100/share > $9.3 billion in current value.
Is there something I'm missing here? Obviously this is assuming that none of the stock was sold (unlikely).
He's done very well for an employee #1 (vs a founder).
Reminds me of a "startup" I worked for in the dotcom boom. I was good friends with employee #1, he brought me on board as something like employee #30. When we IPO'd the founders made hundreds of millions (which they subsequently lost all of in the dotcom crash lol). But we were talking and his equity package was basically the same as mine - we both made between 6 months and a year's salary in the IPO - a nice chunk of change to be sure, but my friend had worked just as hard as any of the founders and made sacrifices in terms of the comfortable corporate job he could have had... This is a story repeated time and time again. It very, very rarely makes sense to be an early employee. Be a founder, or come on board later.
I agree. It was bad enough when I needed to whitelist a handful of google domains to run the JS needed to display simple text. But this page just flat out won't even begin to load. After switching to a 'modern' browser I was able to get to the simple text which I've mirrored here, https://pastebin.com/fFJsPc56
It should be noted that this is an archived "USENET" post.
Usenet was a decentralized message board system, kinda similar to email. That means all of the discussions that took place here are for the most part, lost to the sands of time. There's no centralized servers in USENET, its all decentralized.
Google Groups became one of the more popular USENET services in the early 2000s. But the archives of USENET posts are likely incomplete. Maybe someone with more knowledge of this early internet would be able to comment on where Google got their archives from.
I wouldn't say its dead, but today... people tend to join web-based social networks with more controls. Reddit, Facebook, etc. etc.
USENET was the original social network. But moderation issues (ie: pornography, cracked software distribution) has made it more difficult to interact with raw USENET today unless you specifically pay for a USENET service. Universities have been closing down their public and free USENET servers in recent years.
Overall, discussions online happen over Reddit, Facebook... and of course, Hacker News. I bet you an entire generation of readers have no idea what USENET is.
It would be interesting if someone (maybe the TripleByte folks?) did an analysis of the words/phrasing used to recruit early employees, and compared that to the long term financial success of the company.
I frequently see job postings that poorly articulate the company's purpose, or focus heavily on experience with specific technologies that are easily learned, and arguably unimportant from a hiring perspective. I suspect that there is a negative correlation between those postings and financial performance, but I'm curious if the numbers support that assumption.
Although I don't see Bezos saying anything about what his company actually does... None of the modern "We're going to disrupt X industry" / "We're democratizing Y" / "We're changing the world for the better by giving people Z"
Although it does say "pioneer commerce on the Internet", which at the time may have have been taken as "we're selling physical goods online", as I doubt many digital goods we're getting bought or sold online at the time.
"you should be able to do so in about one-third the time
that most competent people think possible"
I think (I could be wrong) that might attract the wrong type of applicants, such as people who are arrogant or think that building such systems are easy (and thus might not understand the complexities involved).
38 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 94.4 ms ] threadhttps://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/mi.jobs/9N2b9qj2nOc/...
Wow. Who says things like that non-sarcastically?
Oh wait, it's the complete opposite
Shel Kaphan compensation ISOs shares 709,568 given @ $.0014
based on FORM S-1 filed at the time of Amazon IPO https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/0000891020-9...
Is there something I'm missing here? Obviously this is assuming that none of the stock was sold (unlikely).
Reminds me of a "startup" I worked for in the dotcom boom. I was good friends with employee #1, he brought me on board as something like employee #30. When we IPO'd the founders made hundreds of millions (which they subsequently lost all of in the dotcom crash lol). But we were talking and his equity package was basically the same as mine - we both made between 6 months and a year's salary in the IPO - a nice chunk of change to be sure, but my friend had worked just as hard as any of the founders and made sacrifices in terms of the comfortable corporate job he could have had... This is a story repeated time and time again. It very, very rarely makes sense to be an early employee. Be a founder, or come on board later.
Also books. I mean I like books but who reads books in the 90s?
Really don’t bother. This company is going nowhere.
Usenet was a decentralized message board system, kinda similar to email. That means all of the discussions that took place here are for the most part, lost to the sands of time. There's no centralized servers in USENET, its all decentralized.
Google Groups became one of the more popular USENET services in the early 2000s. But the archives of USENET posts are likely incomplete. Maybe someone with more knowledge of this early internet would be able to comment on where Google got their archives from.
More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
USENET was the original social network. But moderation issues (ie: pornography, cracked software distribution) has made it more difficult to interact with raw USENET today unless you specifically pay for a USENET service. Universities have been closing down their public and free USENET servers in recent years.
Overall, discussions online happen over Reddit, Facebook... and of course, Hacker News. I bet you an entire generation of readers have no idea what USENET is.
Deja News had collected USENET archives and Google acquired them in 2001: https://www.google.com/search?q=google+acquires+deja+news
I frequently see job postings that poorly articulate the company's purpose, or focus heavily on experience with specific technologies that are easily learned, and arguably unimportant from a hiring perspective. I suspect that there is a negative correlation between those postings and financial performance, but I'm curious if the numbers support that assumption.
We all start somewhere.
I think (I could be wrong) that might attract the wrong type of applicants, such as people who are arrogant or think that building such systems are easy (and thus might not understand the complexities involved).