A lot of employers who only pay cash have salaries similar to companies that pay cash salary plus equity. Perhaps the equity won't be worth anything, but often times it's extra on top of what's being offered. Those accepting cash only are often leaving potential expected value on the table.

Not true at all in my experience. Employers who do not give equities tend to pay much more generous bonuses.

This is not true at all. It only has to do with if you have "substantial risk of forfeiture". If they are your shares to own forever, the IRS considers receiving them taxable. This is why double trigger RSUs have expiration dates. It's possible they never become liquid. Therefore they're not your property yet. Therefore you don't owe tax until they are. Or they expire worthless someday, and you don't owe anything.

> Today’s entrepreneurs would do well to note that Microsoft made minimal use of venture capital. Microsoft’s only VC only owned 6.2 percent of the company. Gates didn’t trust them.

While the article touches on it here, Microsoft was able to avoid venture capital because it was highly profitable from its very early days. They turned their first profit in 1975, the same year they were founded.

It seems like more companies spend longer amounts of time being unprofitable and growing. How much of that is a zero interest rate phenomenon or the new normal?

Microsoft is also an outlier in having the CEOs and founders parent in the board of IBM who licensed Microsofts software.

Didn’t they only get the IBM contract in 1980 (i.e. 5 years after the company was founded)?

Although that is true, my point is that Bill Gates had an extremely privileged upbringing.

Bill Gates had access to advanced technologies in high school only 0.001% of other students would have.

Bill Gates had direct access to people only 0.001% of his peers would(and I’m no doubt being generous to Bill Gates here).

Bill Gates was a smart kid no doubt, but his environment accounts for most of his success.

Paul Allen, a high school friend of Bill Gates, read an issue of Popular Electronics. Paul showed Bill the article about a new minicomputer.

They cold-called the New Mexico company to push their non-existent BASIC interpreter. Bill took a leave of absence from Harvard and the microcomputer software business took off with the help of Harvard's computer resources.

see https://archive.org/details/197501PopularElectronics/page/n2...

You don't sink the shots that you never shoot - Bill Gates saw an opportunity and took a big shot from downtown.

But that was in 1975. He's made more shots than not since then.

That is absolutely true. But his upbringing gave him a near limitless amount of arrows in his quiver. You honestly don't think that was a huge advantage he had?

It's easy to "take a big shot" when you have all the support in the world.

Easier than without support, but not easy. Not everyone born to means goes on to found wildly successful companies.

Environment matters a tremendous amount. In common scientific terms, there is almost nothing that is not environment. DNA, development, parenting, personality can all be framed as environmentally derived.

Sometimes these factors come together to give people huge advantages, both in situation and support, but also talent, knowledge, and personality.

I think the lesson we should take away from this is the importance of good environmental influences in producing good outcomes.

I agree with you except for one thing.

I wouldn’t argue that Bill Gates was a good outcome.

The world needs more Bill Joys.

Wow what a great point.

it was an outlier then and it’s an outlier now

Indie dev turning profit first year is part of the typically success story for indie devs.

Isn't this based on letter frequency? In languages like German, Z is a fairly common letter. Y not so much. Whereas in English it's the opposite. They put the more commonly used letter in the center.

Is there a more Amazon word than "table stakes"?

I know several people that worked there back in the growth days of the company. They had all drunk the kool aid hard on the work connecting people and making the world a better place. Several of them became very disenchanted when scandals like Cambridge Analytica or the manipulation of the public during 2016 election occurred.

Zuck and the leadership there had really spun a positive, world changing narrative to employees.

Leetcode performance isn’t going to be representative of 3am incident response though. If that matters, you’re probably better off asking a classic “tell me about a time you responded to a page in the middle of the night” type question.

It's a business, not a jobs program

Did I suggest it was? Apparently you missed the topic of this thread: According to the article, layoffs are bad for business.

I was pointing out that there doesn't seem to be an immediate need for layoffs at Google, based on the fact they have more money on hand than some small countries. Even with horrible future revenue projections, that seems like a reasonably large buffer.

But now that you mentioned it, there's nothing wrong with a corporation looking out for the long term interests of their employees. It would actually be smart for Google to act like a "jobs program" and retrain staff, or find work until the business cycle comes back around.

(Brandolini's law is alive and well.)

I agree with you that most American cars are junk. I hate all these same features plus others like the weird headlight controls, parking break on the floor in non-trucks, not to mention the loose feeling brakes and steering.

Traditionally, GM sold other models overseas through brands like Holden or Opel, but these have all been sold off or shut down over the past decade or so except in China. GM now has a much heavier reliance on trucks and SUVs in the North American market. They sell some of those same product overseas still, but in much smaller quantities than before.

You can more smoothly interpolate a function for points on a surface using hexagons than with squares. For Uber, think about things like surge pricing. If you compute a surge % for each hexagon, you can interpolate it for each rider location.