$5 millionaire for a week: riches to rags in the startup world

For a few brief moments, my stock holdings in my former employer were hypothetically worth $5 million. This is the wild story of how I realized less than 1% of that value.

I’ll be pretty specific about some of the numbers, because equity compensation is a mystery to most people. Until I went through this, I never knew what’s possible and what’s normal. It’s a very complicated topic, but I hope that by sharing a real world situation, someone else might be able to learn something useful.

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Meet HyphenTech

GenAI logo of my made-up term

I’m proposing a new term—HyphenTech—to describe much of the tech landscape, in order encourage a better understanding of our current era of tech. Thinking of every new company as a “tech company” is too generic to be useful, but going just one level deeper is helpful.

Everybody wants to be a tech company. It’s a proven path to trillion dollar market caps. However, that path has also proven extremely narrow, only admitting a few companies into the cuatro comas club. Have we had 15 years of bad startups, or is something else going on?

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