HACKER Q&A
📣 takaezo

Rest and Vest or New Opportunity?


I understand this is going to ruffle some feathers around privilege and what not. I apologize but want to hear your thoughts on opportunity cost and the likes.

I have unvested options worth 400K with my current employer but have potential opportunities with two other Series A startups.

My skills are suited to a small company as opposed to a large company that I am at now. Everything moves slowly in a large company.

However, I am unable to leave and take up the opportunity at these smaller companies since I’ll be walking away from guaranteed RSUs (company I work for is publicly traded).

So, for the next three years should I just rest & vest ? At my company I mostly “manage” and don’t “do”. I am someone who likes and thrives in “doing”.

I am sure others might have experienced this in the past. How did you think between the two things or about the opportunity cost in general ?

P.S I am not going to pretend that money isn’t important. I am the first one in my family with a Master’s degree and 400K (current value of stock) is lot of freakin money and walking away is hard but I also know that I can probably make more than in the course of my career, if I am doing what I like doing rather than being a cog in a bigger company.

Thank you for your answers and attacks ! :)

  👤 rmk Accepted Answer ✓
This is a puzzling question. Assuming you are young, $400k invested will easily yield $3M when you are older. Would your future self thank you for roughing it a little? Absolutely!

You could attempt to balance work satisfaction with financial prudence: maybe work 1.5 or 2 years and then move on? Another possibility is to move to another team within the company? If the company is large enough, you will have a good chance of doing this.

👤 kuro-maguro
See if they have a vest on termination clause. If so then get yourself fired by declaring yourself a Republican who's pointing out correlation-causation fallacies regarding the police and BLM. For example, start claiming the police are sexist since a majority of people shot by them are men.
👤 icedchai
I'd say split the difference. Stay where you are for another year or two so you gain some financial benefit, then go for something else where you are better suited. If the thought of that is intolerable, then you should leave sooner.