these days it seems a lot of the burn rate is in sky-high salaries. employees seem to be treating the fund as a piggy bank. i've been speaking to a lot of VC-backed small ventures in the bay area and even in these times, $150k starting salary is not being balked at or even questioned. $150k seems to be the floor for negotiation with many. and thats for engineering...god only knows what the "ceo" is earning, likely $250k or more.
Aren't bigger salaries an offset to the risk?
I mean, startups are riskier than 'solid companies' (well, not that much these days, but that's the premise), so it makes sense to offer more money for someone to 'jump in'...
That or equity - but I suppose with current trend of companies going broke, equity doesn't seem like a good deal for most people...
Brilliant! My advice is to stay in cash (or equivalent).
you'll need it to pay the IRS + state their 50% (if for example, you are a california resident). oddly enough lots of people forget about this simple fact. depending on how the deal is structured, there is a good chance that your tax bill is $1 million. oh by the way they then adjust your next year's taxes upwards and want quarterlies...so leave some money for those (you will get most of it back since your gain is non-recurring)
but still, you're a millionaire.
edit: whoops! i see you say you are in canada. well i suppose the tax situation is likely comparable....
If he structured things properly, this is capital gains -- in which case he's probably got $750k tax-exempt and the rest is only 50% income, so his total income tax (federal + provincial) would be somewhere in the $500-600k range depending on which province he's in.
i strongly disagree. fixed width works in the world of 1998...everyone with a 17 inch monitor on their desks. today screens tend to be very big (24 inch monitor) or very small (iphone). the only viable method for addressing the inverse bell curve of monitor size is with liquid layout.
This presumes that the goal of all websites should be to maximize use of screen real estate. But that goal is in conflict with the basic principles of typography, which suggest that line lengths are not going to scale up with monitor sizes.
California seems overpriced and the state budget is in bad shape
i live in california and love it...i think in so many ways it is the best place in the world to live...but i must admit (with trepidation since i hold so many state bonds)...that the state is doomed.
the size of the fiscal crisis here is not "state size", its "nation size". but california cannot engage in printing money, deficits, or anything else a nation can do to temporarily ease through. tax revenues are dropping like a rock in every city in the state as EVERYONE lines up to get their house re-assessed to get lower taxes.
california was crushed in the housing bubble and prop 13 makes revenue collection even more inflexible. i personally intend to have my property taxes cut in HALF, which is actually accurate and fair given that houses on my street are now...half off. whatever happens i will be paying less in taxes by some amount. now repeat for tens of millions of people...
and there's no stock market windfall to offset the gloom. google and apple are just high-salary employers now. that won't save this state. suffice to say i think the state finances are in doomsday mode. thankfully my kids do not go to public schools...
> california was crushed in the housing bubble and prop 13 makes revenue collection even more inflexible.
Actually, prop 13 is the only reason most CA cities aren't declaring bankruptcy.
Prop 13 has two relevant provisions - a cap on property tax rates and a cap on the rate of growth of the taxable basis w/o a change of ownership or new construction. (IIRC, most/all bay area cites are at the cap.) When you buy a house, you know the most that you'll pay in taxes going forward.
When housing prices boom, Prop 13 means that tax revenues don't boom. It also means that when housing prices crash, tax revenues don't crash.
Yes, the taxes paid by folks who bought near the peak will drop with housing prices. However, the taxes paid by folks who bought long before the peak are continuing to grow because their taxable basis lags the market.
Prop 13 was passed in reaction to a previous boom - property taxes were going up 10-20% a year because that's what housing prices were doing. CA govts don't cut rates and they don't cut revenues either.
If CA cities/counties had been able to grow their tax revenues in proportion to the property values, do you really think that they'd be willing to let their revenues drop with property values? Of course not - they'd increase the tax rates.
probably the first time i vigorously disagree with krugman....and oddly he appears to be in stark contrast to some of his own writings.
austrian economics has probably become too dogmatic for some, but i do think there is validity in the notion that recessions realign capital flows in more constructive directions. look at what we are trying to do now - fight excess debt brought on by overconsumption with more debt to support overconsumption.
the stimulus bill subsidizes the purchase of new cars...but we just spent ten years watching people blow too much of their net worth on cars...is more of this really constructive? what next...government mandates that we all buy (taxpayer subsidized) home theater systems?
i'm troubled that the government is working hard to promote the same reckless overconsumption that put us in this mess to begin with...but it won't work, people out there are getting the message that debt is poison.
i prefer something like itsAllText, which lets me fire up my own local
editor for any textarea (using it now with emacsclient). employing a
local editing tool lets me keep all my keyboard shortcuts, which is
why i use one editor instead of another.
what i would really like to see is direct embedding of your choice of
local editor directly into the textarea. there's no way to satisfy
everyone with one editor.
but still, bespin is very cool and an improvement over plain old
textareas
what i would really like to see is direct embedding of your choice of local editor directly into the textarea.
Back in the day I was hoping that OpenDoc would provide this, but it was not to be. I wouldn't be surprised if we see some vi and emacs clones evolve out of Bespin and then some Greasemonkey scripting could use them to replace textareas.
- american wages will slowly revert to global standards where there is global competition...i.e. start getting used to hiring managers talk about the "bangalore price" just as people in manufacturing have been beaten about with the "china price".
- stock markets will be continuously pummeled by volatility and mandated selling (boomer 401k liquidation)
- the big "IF" - can the dollar survive. we've basically entered a zimbabwe-like state of fabricating huge volumes of new currency to prop up fiscal fractures that were themselves caused by excessive abuse of currency in the 90s. one must ask, at what point does the dollar break? my guess: US debt of 25 trillion
