AI venture capital resorts to feeding the secondary market
Headlines about AI companies paying “billions” for other AI companies mostly don’t mean real money, but equity in private companies with imaginary valuations. But sometimes, people want actual mone…
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Whenever there’s a sale, the majority of eligible employees sell up. Nothing like confidence, eh?
this is just sound financial advice, you convert your vested company shares into SPY as fast as possible, otherwise you have your income eggs and your investment eggs in the same basket.
If I'm not mistaken, in past tech booms, many employees used to become rich by keeping at least some of their stock, though. I think it is somewhat telling if most of the employees (who could be expected to be familiar with the company, its technology, its products and markets) don't seem to expect this to happen here, but rather treat this as a job in a more "mature" industry with little growth potential, such as manufacturing or banking.
Also, capital market investors tend to consider so-called "insider trading" (which includes trades by company employees and executives) as somewhat predictive of stock prices, as far as I know.
It’s the risk:benefit tradeoff always. Sure you can hold on to all your illiquid stock in a private company with transfer restrictions, but will that pay for a house or even a banana? Does it ever not. The “take a loan for liquidity until you can sell some stock” trick worked for a little bit but companies are wise to that too now, and don’t allow it.
So people can pick between real money they can spend on stuff (or invest in a slightly less illiquid way) or being paper multimillionaires with no actual liquidity; not a hard choice imho.
I think all of this should be true about almost any other company. However, if OpenAI employees had a reasonably strong belief in the hype surrounding their company and their technology, wouldn't they be holding more shares? After all, the rest of the world is constantly being told that this is the future and that pretty much all of our jobs are at risk because of it.
I’m sure there are plenty of true believers (there always are in startup brain land), but even true believers like spending money.