I will never buy a gas car again. I plan to keep my Boxster until I can buy an EV version.

The other card we use is an Amex Platinum. We are very careful to use all of its benefits and more than cover the yearly membership fee. For example, $100 credit once a quarter for meals booked via Resy, free Walmart+ which gets you free Paramount+ or Peacock. Amex then has a streaming credit that covers the other one every month. Booked a family trip with Amex and received over $500 in hotel credits at that property. Amex is also great about just sorting any issue quickly as well as sorting hard to get dinner reservations and concert tickets.

First a 409A is generally engineered to keep the lowest value possible in order to allow the employees to exercise their options at the lowest value via an 83b election so at an exit they can be taxed at the long term capital gains rate. When someone joins a startup and is issued options the value of the stock is set via the 409A (which has to be renewed every year). The lower the number the more likely an employee can afford to write the check. 100K shares at $0.01 vs at $0.25 is a major factor for anyone to consider. Any startup worth their damn will make sure the facts in any 409A fit a low number for that reason. The reality of an exit where you are acquired will be based on other numbers that optimize for forward earns and value of your team and tech.

The questions you need to ask are:

What is the total authorized shares? What is the required process to raise that number? How are we funded? Does funding include preferred shares? What is the preference on those shares? On an exit what is the payment order?

I agree about the salary bands and at my current company we provide them, as well as answering all the questions above upfront to any candidate with an offer.

The reality of windsurf is that the founders are scum and this is going to end up in court for years. Google should be ashamed.

Everyone here that has started a company to challenge the entrenched monopoly raise your hands please.

I understand the tech deeply and that does not translate to the practical needs of trying to run a successful business.

I raise a toast to these guys. Well done.

H>I

A>B

L>M

Interviewing is hard. Over the years the one thing I have learned is that for a technical role you want to interview people for how they THINK and REASON. This is hard and requires a time investment in the interview.

Back in the day when interviewing people for roles in networking, data center design, etc. I used to start by saying I am going to ask you a question and unless you have seen this very specific issue before you will NOT know the answer and I do not want you to guess - what I care about is can you reason about it and ask questions that lead down a path that allows you to get closer to an answer - this is the only technical question I will be asking and you have the full interview time to work thought it. I have people with 4+ CCIE family certs (this is back when they were the gold standard) and 10 year experience have no idea how to even reason about the issue. The candidates that could reason and work the problem logically became very successful.

For coding at my company now we take the same approach. We give candidates a problem with a set of conditions and goal and ask them to work through their approach, how they would go about testing it, and then have them code it in a shared environment of their choosing. The complexity of the problem depends on the level the candidate is interviewing for. For higher level engineerings besides the coding, we include a system architecture interview, presenting a requirement, taking the time to answer any questions, and then asking the candidate how they would implement it. At the end we do not care if it complies, what we care about is did the candidate approach the problem reasonably. Did they make sure to ask questions and clarifications when needed. Did their solution look reasonable? Could they reason on how to test it? Did their solution show that they thought about the question - IE, did they take the time to consider and understand before jumping in.

Anyone can learn to code (for the most part). Being able to think on the other hands seems to be something that is in short supply.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler

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