
Square Falls on Concerns Over Financing of Loan Program - iamchmod
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-05/square-sales-beat-estimates-on-expanding-services-for-business
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squaredaway
In early 2014, Square arranged for a private market purchase of a limited
number of employee shares as part of one of their later rounds (D or E). It is
astonishing that the public market price has never risen above the price
offered to employees in this liquidation event. Most employees thought the
price offered was "too cheap" at roughly $16 per share.

This should be a lesson to everybody working at a startup: always take money
off the table whenever it is offered.

~~~
YuriNiyazov
Facebook was down _for a year_ after its IPO. It now trades at 3x of its IPO
price. "Always take money off the table whenever it is offered." is terrible
advice.

~~~
jonathanjaeger
I feel like when you're working at a company that's about to go public, you
can sort of see the writing on the wall (e.g. quick wins with no long-term
strategy, high turnover and bad morale, upcoming products, etc.). I run
Facebook marketing campaigns and it was so clear that mobile advertising was
going to be a cash cow in the early days -- this was before any numbers were
out there and people were still VERY skeptical about Facebook's mobile
strategy. I think employees who want to live dangerously by not selling their
stock should use their gut based on what they see working or not working at
their company.

~~~
pfarnsworth
Employees are generally the worst judges of whether or not a company's stock
price will go up. They have far too vested an interest to make an unbiased
assessment, and most people anyway don't know what the markets are looking for
in terms of making the stock price go higher.

