
Employee #1: Airbnb - craigcannon
http://themacro.com/articles/2016/07/nick-grandy/
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callmeed
I think this is the 2nd such interview where an early employee was a founder
of a different YC startup that fizzled out. I think it underscores one of the
powerful aspects of YC as a network–the startups that fail become a solid pool
of candidates for the ones that take off. They've already been vetted as
resourceful hackers (or they wouldn't have go into YC) and they're already
accustomed to the startup life (not like you're trying to poach them from
Google).

If it was planned this way, it was very smart. If it was an unintended
consequence, its very fortunate.

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rrecuero
Something similar happened to me going through the Startup Bootcamp incubator
in Europe. In the end, the best leads come from your network. As you said they
are already vetted and you have already worked with them through the program
so the decision becomes much easier.

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xiaoma
So as employee #1 of a ten billion dollar company, what was the equity portion
of his compensation like? So many YC companies sell equity as a higher risk
replacement for salary. What does the outcome look like in a case like Airbnb
where the company was a huge success?

Has he even been allowed to keep his shares or sell them on a secondary market
like early facebook employees did?

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ChuckMcM
I think this would have been a good question to answer. I recognize that Nick
might be uncomfortable answering it.

There are always questions around how "successful" employees are versus
founders, and the situations all are a bit different. For example, in my
experience I was employee #9 at GolfWeb (a startup in 1995) and my stock was
worthless when CBS Interactive acquired the company, I was employee 1990 at
Sun and at Sun's peak valuation in 1998 the total stock I had owned would have
been worth over $10M (I didn't have it all at that point :-), having sold much
of it for mundane things like down payments on houses and cars and such, but
the point was the equity from Sun was much higher than it was from the
"startup" and I wasn't a founder in either case) People who joined Google (or
Apple!) in 2009 and are still there, probably did quite well on their stock if
they held it.

To answer your more basic question, when you exercise your option at a non-
publicly traded startup, your shares will be covered by the purchase contract
that is included in the option. That contract can (and often does) restrict to
whom you can re-sell those securities. As the company keeps the books on who
actually owns the shares, they have a lot of control over them. For example
they can refuse to transfer them to a buyer when you and the buyer approach
them to settle your transaction.

And since there aren't a lot of liquidity events where employees can sell
stocks these days, its an interesting question to explore.

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otterley
I think you interviewed me at GolfWeb! You made me an offer there but I
declined and went to iPass. Small world.

~~~
ChuckMcM
The SF Bay area is exceptionally small in many ways.

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jacobtr
The importance of having an MVP out there that potential first employees can
play around with:

'Whereas with the Airbnb guys, they were super early and small but they had a
product, a V1, that was up and running. And the product was working. I used it
as part of my application process and was like “Yes, this is super cool, this
works, I can totally envision this growing and taking over the world and I
want to help do that.”'

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richardburton
Really enjoying this. Tiny typo: andd -> and

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gargarplex
The question I want answered is how much money did he make

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cloudjacker
he hasn't yet, no mention of selling anything on the secondary market, and no
IPO so we just have to assume he still has his illiquid shares

