e9

Interesting, I got notification from Github:

"Incident with Grok 4.6 Copilot AI Model Provider"

at 7:20 am PT

Someone could've trained model on top of GLM. Same way Cognition trained their SWE model on top of Kimi and Cursor did same with their Composer model.

I agree with you on the harness. I find that Claude can be good in any harness but GPT is only superior inside Codex.

I want to propose alternative reality where 1.5-2.5T in value doesn't go to a handful of companies. Instead it turns out to be like restaurants where this gets distributed to lots and lots of small, local, mostly interchangeable teams. There will of course be some super star "chefs" leading the industry and setting trends and some "restaurant chain" like big businesses and supply chain for all of this.

my 2nd point says that due to dilution rounds your 5% chance is not 10M but about 3M so

5% * $3M = $150k expected equity value

$150k / 1.15 = ~$130k/year

which is same as you started with

Unfortunately this author has no idea about how equity works in real life, 2 things that stand out from experience of being very early employee 8 times: 1. If startup raised money at some point in the past and they are at 50M valuation then there is no chance average employee will get offer of 1% (you would need to be someone special to get that) 2. There will be many more dilution rounds before they get to 1B valuation so chances are that 1% will get cut to 0.3% over that time period

Private companies are not obligated to report GAAP numbers which means they can creatively twist numbers while still be truthful until they go public

World is large and I only get to see and experience slice of it. Thanks for sharing the link.

I founded 2 of the companies above (1 acquihire, 1 sold big portion of my shares back to investors when I left).

Yes I agree founding is much better than being first engineer. Reason I kept joining as first engineer is because I found product market fit for my self (it's funny to say that haha). I was able to pitch myself as first engineer that builds first product and first teams. Someone super technical who likes to grow code and grow people is actually pretty rare in startup world so I was able to ask for high comp and choose to work on interesting projects.

Founding engineer 8 times. 5 exits(2 sold shares back to investors, 2 acquihires, 1 acquisition). Never really made any significant money. I would make 10x more if I spent same time at big tech. Milage may vary but my 2 cents if you want to be entrepreneur or work for a startup:

1. Enjoy the process (You can push harder and longer if you enjoy what you do and at the end it won't matter if money doesn't come because any time spent enjoying what you do is already a win)

2. Work with people you like (For founders: don't be single founder, 90% of the times single founders either don't know how to share or no one wants to work with them)