This is why I will never work somewhere with a short post termination exercise period (PTEP). If it’s not at least 5 years, ideally 10, they don’t seriously consider equity something that employees are owed.
Can you explain? In most cases, preferences won’t come into play, assuming you raise at a standard 1x preference and sell for more than you have raised. In that case, owning 0.5% should roughly translate into $5M (modulo dilution).
There are plenty of valid scenarios where the company sells for a lot, but less than it raised. And 1x preferences are no longer standard post-ZIRP, afaik.
People are often not aware that the value of common is nonlinear, so the value of 0.5% in this case is zero. (For the ML fans out there, the common price per share has one or more ReLU activation layers. :) )
Even with 1x preferences, the company might have raised $2 billion but sells for $1 billion because the investors don't want to get any further losses.
The general rule of thumb is that acquisitions are bad for employees, and IPOs are good, especially if the share price is stable for 6 months.
Also for acquisitions, often you'll have to work at the acquiring company for some time to get money from your options. Or might get options in the acquiring company instead (which again are worth nothing until some future possible equity event which hopefully translates into cash).
That would be the naive mathematical interpretation and how the system would work if engineers designed it. Lawyers designed it, though, and they probably know some tricks to make that not happen.
Business people hired lawyers to design means and methods to commit _implicit_ fraud and deceptive practices to improve the value of their capital assets.
Those lawyers then go on to sell this product to others.
I'm sure there's some lawyers out there that are going out there shopping this stuff around, but it's Capitalism and Business thats the active agent, not Lawyers.
I hate how every company that I place an order with treats that as permission to send a constant drip of marketing emails. I send them straight to spam.
I think FAANG-like big IC offers right now are flying around for technical people familiar with the current hot "AI" methods. A lot of hype, a lot of situational ethics around copyright, and some investment scams, but some of the tech is ready for legitimate things people want to do, at acceptable quality levels for the application.
Also, one thing that happened early in the dotcom gold rush is that a ton of people swarmed in, all suddenly acting like experts and professionals, with little/no prior experience. Meanwhile, Internet people who were also prolific programmers were, like, who are all these people, and why do many of them have fashionable eyeglasses like nerds would never try to pull off. I don't know how much we'll see something like that this time.
agree 100% with this nice comment from a fellow dot-com crash observer.
Many HackerNews readers are young'uns who are seduced by FANG salaries, and the latest AI/ML bandwagon. They dont have the perspective one gets having seeing the highs and the lows.
I can bet there will be another rude awakening around the corner which will wipe out the "pretenders". After the dot-com bust, many pretenders left the silicon valley with anecdotes of leased BMWs abandoned at SFO airport.
After the AI/ML hype deflates, there is likely to be a similar separation. Folks in it for real will be separated from the folks who came in for the riches.
And for the history-buffs this rhymes with the CA gold-rush circa late 1800s - some found it, most didnt, levis profited selling denims to them.
The rule of thumb is roughly 44gb, as most models are trained in bf16, and require 16 bits per parameter, so 2 bytes. You need a bit more for activations, so maybe 50GB?
you need enough RAM and HBM (GPU RAM) so it’s a constraint on both.
These prices are insane- you can do much, much better than those prices if you negotiate. If you're paying $7.20 per GPU-hour for an H100, you should find another supplier.
The rule-of-thumb over a few decades is that enterprise initial quote pricing is usually 200% of the lowest negotiated price. That final price should be between 9% (PC commodity margins) to 50%+ profit over costs of sales.
Also, I really would like to know what the real (unit) costs of goods of H100's would be, but that's proprietary info no one outside of Nvidia execs and accountants would ever see.
