You can do this with non intrusive lists too. See c++’s merge/splice/etc. You can store the iterators in some other place as you do this, making it quite handy on occasion.

It’s strange, every startup offer either is obviously a horrible scam or comes from a place of fairness and is sold like a total scam.

I guess being honest brings about too many opportunities for people who don’t understand the finances to make (or be perceived to make ) promises they can’t keep. So you might as well just get into a race to present the most ridiculous stuff possible.

Pref shares do get diluted, they are however senior to common stock so they get money FIRST if there’s not enough to go around. There is some cap on this and sometimes it’s pretty high. Huge pref overhangs are, indeed, a problem.

Pref shares with a 1x preference are still worth like 10x common stock in early stage companies and it’s common for employed to get fucked by this.

Founders don’t get preferred shares (I think it’s really, really rare). There is founder pref stock, which is somewhat different. It’s common for founders to cash out some shares along the way, though.

Founders that take a pay cut from a high paying job should demand preferential shares to the value they are giving up.

If they were in job where they were saving $50k a year, then after becoming a founder they should be getting $50k worth of preferential shares per year because they are investing that much in the business.

Not that I've actually ever heard of founders getting preferential shares to match their dollars invested.

It would cost an extreme amount. The only reason to do something like that would be to defer capital gains into retirement while protecting your position.

You can use a collar for this at somewhat reasonable cost. Not sure how rolling that would compare to just using it to defer until you can cheaply sell and buy some fixed income ladder. Probably badly.

Also, there’s no capital gains to defer if you use a retirement account, which will be a better place for fixed income anyway.

I mean homeownership (with the intent to occupy the home yourself) causes this misallocation by itself. The proper policy remedy would be to prohibit people from owning their own home until it was a very small portion of their net worth.

I think this policy has been crafted in a lab to have both very few financial losers and yet make literally everyone mad.

It is worth about what it's worth, and that's not zero, but the difference between the median realized value and the mean realized value (upon which the price is set) is much higher than for public equities.

The above means it can be an irrational bet to take the startup equity if the price you pay in opportunity cost is high relative to your bank. This problem gets worse the longer you stay after that first vesting, but is mitigated by the extrinsic option value of your options (which goes away when you leave and exercise)

You can use the rerere-train script in the git repo to populate rerere from existing merges. I use this when something in a merge has regressed a big feature branch and I need to bisect. I can train rerere then rebase on the 2nd to latest merge-base, all while still doing no extra work if there isn't a regression.

This is only sorta true, the total dilution from SBC is very small for most tech companies with some outliers (cough snap cough).

They may not purchase on exactly the vesting date but they certainly do offset the issued shares with buybacks. I think they can choose to reduce those buybacks without as much rigamarole as they'd need to issue new shares for funding, so they can effectively used that as a "back door" way to raise money. I think it might juice their P&L a little too, but I doubt that's why they do it.

The annual price-appreciation of a home is usually lower than the risk-free rate (and thus the HELOC rate). If you "pay yourself" rent and use that to pay the HELOC down then it can make sense I suppose.

It's just leverage and it depends on the returns you're getting on the loan. Renting is also a kind of leverage though so if you own a home outright it might make sense to lever up. If you want that kind of leverage while still having the position in the house then an I/O loan is probably the easiest way to do it.

If you have public REITs active nearby you can do this comparison for real: if you buy ~1 unit's value in shares of that landlord you will probably own about 1/<however many units they operate> of the company and receive someplace around the rent of that unit in dividends and capital gains.

The government subsidies for investing in the stock market are also pretty nuts, and the TCJA hosed owner-occupants by limiting the interest deduction, the gains exclusion, and raising the standard deduction.

If you invest you get to deduct any interest against investment gains (even better: you can just not pay any interest), you pay ZERO capital gains taxes on up to ~$80,000 of (real!) contributions each year (with no maximum excluded gains), you can defer $22,000 of (real!) income to literally whenever, AND you can take the standard deduction every year (including in retirement when you wouldn't have had any income to deduct had you paid off a house).