To me thats 6 months at my current rate and a year being frugal. I'm aware its totally different economics than myself, but it just kinda made me laugh.
I wouldn't call $25,000 nothing personally, but it's all about perspective, I suppose.
MSFT: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=MSFT+Insider+Transactions
Expenses add up, and you make your way down the slippery slope of labeling things as "necessities".
This is pretty much what I did when starting up, realising I wanted as much runway as possible.
Have to say I also guffawed at $25k being "no personal savings".
It's not a kick-back, it's a stock sale. If Rand takes a million off the table, he's selling a million bucks in stock (and reducing his ownership accordingly). This actually helps other shareholders a touch in the B round because the company has to issue fewer new shares (causing early investors to get diluted less in the new round).
But yeah-- theoretically an investor could sell broadly crappy terms to some founders by buying out a mess of their shares. If founders want to screw their employees, they can often find a way (see Skype).
I'm not following this logic. If a founder sells their own shares in a B-round and pockets the proceeds -- that doesn't do anything to allow the company to issue fewer new shares because none of the money from those shares went to the company.
Hate to do this, but Micheal Dell and Bill Gates have innovated in the last decade? Really? Is this the same decade or has there been a different decade I somehow missed?
You're really going to hold it against him that he isn't still a dynamo of ideas and innovation?
Good for him then. That's an argument I hear far too often that, in my opinion, appeals purely to greed and fosters self-entitlement as if it was a good thing.
My two cents, as a guy who struggled with depression for several years due in large part to having held such a negative opinion of myself that I couldn't celebrate any intermediate successes.
The two words are close to eachother, but I am wary of 'deserve' because it seems to be abused.
I think this is an increasingly popular viewpoint these days, and is being recognized by lots of startups taking funding and taking some money off the table. Money makes you comfortable, yes, but you need the rest of your environment to be comfortable (relatively) to focus on your business and put your effort into that.
And I, for one, am very glad that founders these days have this option, do to what they love and want to do without having to worry about financial security (well, in some cases anyways).
If nothing else, he can reinvest that money to other startups as an angel.
Sure not having money is a great motivator, but the time spent doing other things just to save money often costs you more. As an example, I've spent a lot of time writing a script for a product overview video for my startup. I could be spending this time on more valuable tasks, like product dev or sales, if I had the money to go with another company.
