michaelrwolfe1

Wang didn't get $14b, he only owns about 15% of Scale. We also don't know how much he sold. He could have sold all of his stock (netting him around $4.5b), none, or something in the middle.

Not true since you can sell the stock as soon as it is vested.

I admire these guys, but the probability of getting rich by going into banking or consulting or big law, for example, is quite high compared to almost any other career.

There are people at Google making > $1M a year if you include RSUs.

Recruiting costs, signing bonus, salary, health care, insurance, taxes, equipment, office space, software subscriptions, expenses. I've been at 5 startups, and we always budgeted 200-250k per hire per year

You have to find investors who share your vision, trust your team, and are smart enough to know the business is capital intensive. I've been on 5 teams that did this successfully.

VCs can't ask for their money back. It belongs to the company and is in the company bank account. They can refuse to give you more, and if they control the board they can try to put in a new management team, but except for cases of fraud or other malfeasance, they cannot get their money back.

I've spoken to Yishan a few times over the last year about the stress of running Reddit - I can confirm the story as told by Sam and Yishan is true. Sometimes there is more to the story than what you see on the surface, but sometimes there isn't. In this case, there isn't.

Yes, the stock price reflect poor performance, but be aware that going forward, focusing on the near-term stock price is precisely the wrong thing to do. The investments the company needs to make will take many years to play out, and the shareholders will need to be patient.

What is your reasoning for why insuring manual cars would be any more expensive than it is now? If anything, it would be less expensive since those cars are sharing the road with safer self-driving cars.

I agree with you.

"Don't collaborate well" was poor writing on my part - I'm talking about a specific type of poor collaboration, including undermining and attacking co-workers. I clarified in the post. There are other kinds of poor collaboration skills that have nothing to do with assholeness.

Pissing people off and conflict are fine in the course of honest and healthy debate to get to the right answers. Good companies encourage that.

Assholes actively undermine healthy conflict by 1) cutting off debate so that their ideas win, and 2) resorting to personal attacks. This leads to an "unsafe" environment where people don't want to speak up.

Unfortunately the boss is often the asshole, which creates an environment where people just keep their mouths shut since speaking up is not worth the trouble.

There is nothing wrong with feeling this way - it is often the truth. I've hired many people who were frustrated with their jobs, and I've quit jobs for this reason. But there is a way to communicate it professionally - simply say that you didn't feel challenged with the work and that you weren't learning anything. Just don't rant about how they were a bunch of idiots.

Nepotisms and cliques are not good, and I'm not defending them - you should never recommend someone into a company unless you think they kick ass, and if you are a founder you should work very hard to keep the number of people who have worked together to a minority, otherwise the new folks will feel like outsiders.

But it certainly is the case that the kind of people you want to hire are the kind where anyone who has worked with that person would say, "I'd love to work with them again."

Hey guys, author here. I just re-read this post (it was originally from a Quora thread a couple of years back) and realized that it is not my best. I didn't take the time to discuss my definition of "asshole" nor took the time to do the topic justice since it requires more than a few bullet points ("The No Asshole Rule" devoted an entire book to the topic)! I will make some mods to flesh it out.

I have also discovered that the downside of writing about assholes in the workplace is that criticisms of the piece usually end with the commenter calling you an asshole.