I got an offer from from Databricks for senior SWE. 180k base and 50,000 options for 4 years, no cash bonus, no signon. Base is lower than my current and I have no idea how to evaluate their options. They tell me they are growing fast and will do generous refreshes. What do you think? What is their culture like? Will I regret if I join? Any insider tips are appropriated.
Just get FMV and total number of stocks . Otherwise it is difficult to evaluate. The spread should be at least 3 times of your strike price.
Wait. Isn’t exercising price the most recent fair market price? Or are you referring to preferred shares?
Background and current TC?
I don’t want them to rescind my offer. Current TC is $330k.
It seems the offer is in the same range
So they offered me the exact figure and then went ghost because I can only join in 4 instead of 3 weeks. So, evaluate it accordingly. Immensely unprofessional but seemed like a good company on the site so it's hard. Don't jeopardize your current position. You seem better off. The reviews aren't great anyway fwiw. Snowflake computing is a good option FYI. Startup, good hr, good people working there, probably will be taken over by some giant.
Thanks! How did you evaluate current equity value? What do you think about their upside?
Tbh, I liked the company, people around, location, salary was fair (probably less for you), hr lady had a good background and seemed nice until they went ghost and borked it altogether. I personally would not go there unless by base is beaten by 10%.
Microsoft has already shelled out $7.5 billion on github and $20 billion on LinkedIn. Why would they not acquire snowflake which has better revenue traction than databricks?
Your “license“ is expiring? License to do what?
Seems like I'm going to need to ask for a significant raise
Heh
Hell yeah
^ And raise it for a homeboy that the HR is fucked up.
We have a growth trajectory similar to all those successful SaaS companies at this stage. Databricks has a very different business model than Cloudera or Horntonworks, so we will see :)
See that’s where I don’t agree. You guys are not a “typical“ SaaS companies. SaaS means end-user facing like SFDC, Workday, etc. You guys are infrastructure software for data built on top of cloud infrastructure. Your population target market is data scientists and data engineers. You might not be Hadoop, because Hadoop was just file storage, while you guys can operate on multiple types of storages, but you ARE a processing framework. And when that processing framework gets old if something like Apache Beam, or Flink takes off, then it would suck for Databricks
You know what, we are not just selling Spark. But you are right in that we are also PaaS.
HD Insight is going to destroy databricks.
HDinsight is Hadoop. Hadoop is now legacy technology. The power of Spark is the processing framework WITHOUT having to have Hadoop underneath. You can have any type of data store (except maybe RDBMS or MPP). Spark is going to destroy Hadoop. Which means Databricks destroys HDInsights (or at least limits its growth).
Are you on the HDInsight team buddy? I know it sucks to be the abandoned child.
That package is sort of low for a senior engineer. 50k shares at $4 a share is going to cost you $200k in after tax money to exercise over 4 years. Basically you will just be working for the cash to exercise your shares? Would you want to buy that much in this company’s stock? Lol if you are already making 330k in liquid money I would chill where you are at. The packages are NOT in the same range. 50k shares/4 = 12500 shares a year. It costs you 50k to buy that and its preferred value is 120k. So you have this nonliquid stock that you made $70k on plus your 180k in salary a year. No bonus and no espp which means it’s at most $250k a year but your cash position would be terrible. 180k after taxes is 120k, and then you spend $50k on this stock so you have 70k in cash. You also risk your money in this non liquid stock that could go under $4 a share. Put $50k of your money in any other public tech company and you will do better. If you want to YOLO a bit just take $50k of your current salary and buy stock options on public companies. If you are joining for money this is a clearly losing proposition. To recover the $80k difference you are losing per year the stock has to go up $7 a share. So that’s nearly double. You could just leetcode and get a 500k a year offer at FANG as a senior engineer. Having liquid money let’s you invest in other things so you have opportunity costs too. If you are joining just to have “startup experience” I would still ask for more cash upfront because no cash bonus sucks. Also think about what “generous refreshes” means. You are not getting RSU refreshes. You are getting the option to BUY more of their stock lol. Do you really want that? Ask for more cash bro. If they say no just move on.
Thank you. Just curious, what do you think about the MS acquisition possibility that the Microsoft guy posted and deleted?
What did the MS guy say? I didn’t see it. MS acquisition possibility is definitely a possibility considering the Azure partnership. Azure is supposedly doing well according to the MS earnings and having this add on is probably good for them. I have gone through acquisitions before and usually it’s still just the vested options that turn into cash. The unvested options convert to the acquirer’s stock options. If you want Microsoft stock why not just apply to msft or lnkd? LNKD packages are better than this databricks offer.
What is option price and FMV price ?
It’s $4 to exercise. They don’t tell me FMV price.
Lol why would you even consider joining then?