Re: How many worthless stock options do yo

[Bruce Byfield <bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com>]

Sabahat Ashraf wrote:

> Though, folks, there *are* people for whom options are more'n some will
> o' the wisp. I can count several people that *are* worth several million
> -- even after the fall -- due to those things. And there's a whole city
> of them down here in the Valley; it's called, variously, Tasman Drive,or Cisco
> City, or The City of Cisco.

Why am I certain that nobody in that region is a tech-writer, or even a manager of
technical publications? :-).

Seriously, the most that the average employee can hope for is  a bonus to pay for a
few extras. Anyone who thinks otherwise has such a floppy, hoppy bunny view of the
world that I wish Dorothy Parker was still around to do justice to it (she was the
one who said, while watching plays by A. A. Milne of Winnie the Pooh fame, "Tonstant
weader threw up").

> One more thing; being an owner *does* make things different.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that "the rich are different." Ernest Hemmingway replied,
"Yes, they have more money."

Owners are people doing what they want to do. Employees are people doing things
because they have to. Unfortunately, owners often don't know the difference.


> Secondly, I personally have never been in a situation where I had
> anything that was vested and worth something.

The only time I was vested, this little old man with bales of cloth at his feet had
a tape measure around me.

(I'm sorry, watching Marx Brothers' movies does this to me. Honk, honk!)

Seriously, it's interesting to tally the responses I received to my innocent
question. About one in seven or eight got any money from stock options from new
companies, and nobody was even a paper millionaire.

It's a different story, of course, with options from well-established companies. Not
that a writer will become rich from them, either. However, keep them long enough,
and they can be a very welcome nest egg, especially when they build up over a decade
or two.


--
Bruce Byfield bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com 604.421.7177





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