Unlimited Vacation Policies

waiea

I’m on vacation next week!

Agghh I’m gonna be working the whole time, I just know it.

My company has an unlimited vacation policy. Outsiders ask why we don’t all just take off 52 weeks a year. I don’t know. Most employees with unlimited vacation end up taking zer0 weeks a year.

Tech companies don’t hire employees who take vacation. Early-stage companies can’t afford to. We’re too small to have employee redundancy. When our server engineer is out (oops that’s me), backend development comes to a halt and everyone’s blocked.

Some speculate that “unlimited vacation” is a scheme to avoid paying employees for vacation days they didn’t take. Ha. The cost of paying out a few weeks’ vacation is nothing compared the value of the unpaid overtime we pull.

We talk a lot about the tech “talent shortage”, but come on – software development doesn’t require talent. Anyone with a couple years’ training could do my job. The real shortage lies in the lack of people willing to work obscenely long hours. When your company only has the funding to hire four developers, that’s what you need.

Last month, our lone iOS developer had a baby arrive sooner than expected. It was two weeks before launch and the timing was terrible. He videoconferenced in to our daily check-in wearing scrubs and a surgical mask. We urged him to get offline, attend to mommy and baby. But we were quietly glad that he didn’t. He was back at work the next day.

To avoid this kind of nonsense, Facebook and Apple pay the medical costs for female employees to freeze their eggs. This allows women to delay childbearing without a biologically-imposed deadline. It’s ostensibly a move to support female career empowerment, but the message is clear: We expect you to use these eggs after you’ve left Facebook. Tech companies put their engineers out to pasture by age 35 so there’s still plenty of time to become a wife and mother.

It’s not coercion or exploitation – the engineers choose this kind of life. Silicon Valley’s culture attracts a special breed of people who work nights, weekends, and Federal holidays because their lives are otherwise devoid of joy. There’s no reason to go home anyway.

Are you so far right on the autism spectrum that your only friends live inside a docker container? Do you spend your free time hacking esoteric programming languages while cobwebs collect on your gonads? We’re hiring!

Let’s Go Troll Some Bitcoin Companies

My company launched our app last week (yay). Before we even hit the App Store, the guys at Bitcoin Uncensored took to their podcast and promptly ripped us a new one.

The co-hosts are self-professed “Bitcoin trolls”, where they define trolling as an expression of skepticism. They proudly claim that anyone trolling Bitcoin is usually right.

Well, yeah. 99% of Bitcoin companies die. Just like 99% of all startups die. That’s why they’re funded by venture capitalists and not your Grandmother’s pension fund*.

Pointing at losers is the wrong game to play. You don’t run a venture fund by identifying everything that’s shit and investing in whatever remains.

What more, VCs are quite aware that 90% of their investments will be writeoffs; that’s why they desperately seek unicorns.

I like to make fun of VCs for funding dumb stuff, but it’s mostly because I’m jealous that they have the funds to invest in dumb stuff.

A quick look at the Andreessen-Horowitz portfolio:

Theranos is based on false science, Zenefits is committing felonies, Lyft is as good as dead, 21.co is a Keynesian coalmine, uBeam violates the laws of physics, Airbnb will never be profitable, Stripe had a shit IPO, oh wait that was Square, Instacart is the next Webvan, Slack is gonna get killed when IRC makes its comeback, Twitter is a feature not a company, and Box will bleed into oblivion.

Even if every single statement is correct, a16z walks away with a great return thanks to the last two. If only half my statements are correct, then a16z achieves phenomenal returns for its LPs.

So haha nice one Bitcoin trolls. We’ll be crying into our steak and lobster at tomorrow’s launch party, courtesy of American Express Ventures.

*Not exactly true.

Fantex Creates an ETF to Offload Unwanted Athletes

payday-loans-sign

Fantex is a stock exchange that issues tracking stocks tied to an athlete’s earnings. The athlete receives a few million upfront, then gives up 10% of his income for the rest of his life.

I opened an account on Fantex last summer to buy a piece of Vernon Davis. I have no idea who Vernon Davis is, but I liked the idea of turning a pro athlete into my indentured servant by proxy. (no, not really. I just like to gamble.)

I thought about becoming one of those activist investors, maybe teach Davis to code and get him a job at Google. You know, to reduce income volatility. But then I learned that I don’t actually own Vernon Davis.

The Vernon Davis tracking stock is actually one share of Fantex, Inc. It’s up to the Fantex board of directors to pay dividends based on an athlete’s income, and only if they feel like it (“permitted, but not required”).

Fine, whatever. I chose to assume that risk when I filled out their form saying I was okay with potentially losing all my money.

Until now, athlete tracking stocks could only be traded on the Fantex marketplace. But today, Fantex announced that they would offer a bundled unit of ten different athletes. And they’re gonna list this thing on NASDAQ.

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Since my first purchase, Vernon Davis’s share price has traded between $12 and $4 with an average daily volume of 40. More recently, Fantex debuted a Jack Mewhort tracking stock. For the last six months, Mewhort shares had an average daily volume of 5.

That’s sad. In fact, the total number of Jack Mewhort shares that have ever changed hands on the Fantex marketplace is 471.

268,100 shares of Jack Mewhort tracking stock supposedly sold in the IPO. Where did they go?

From the FXSP S-1:

On July 14, 2015, we completed our initial public offering of 268,100 shares of our Fantex Series Jack Mewhort. Our parent purchased 124,014 shares of Fantex Series Jack Mewhort in the offering at $10.00 per share, which was the initial offering price to the public, for an aggregate purchase price of $1.2 million. In addition, certain directors of our parent purchased an aggregate of 69,520 shares of Fantex Series Jack Mewhort in the offering at the offering price of $10.00 per share for an aggregate purchase price of $695,200.

The prospectus was filed by Fantex, Inc. The “parent” is Fantex Holdings. The only people buying up Jack Mewhort are Fantex itself and maybe Jack’s mother.

I’m not picking on Jack Mewhort here; other players see similarly little interest. Fantex doesn’t actually have very many customers. Here are all their listings and stockholders:

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Fantex Holdings and its directors purchased the majority of the athlete tracking stocks at each IPO. And now all of their purchases are being pooled into an ETF thing to be listed on NASDAQ.

So Fantex raised $51 million from venture capitalists and used this money to buy career bonds from football players. They made tracking stocks for the junk bonds but couldn’t sell them on their own marketplace, so they’re repackaging the unwanted assets into collateralized debt obligations to dump on NASDAQ. And the tracking stocks are really just shares of Fantex.

See Also:
1. Fantex, Inc. Files Registration Statement For First-Ever Bundled Unit Linked To Earnings Of 10 Separate Professional Athletes –fantex.com
2. S-1: Fantex Sports Portfolio 1 Units –sec.gov
3. S-1: Fantex Series Vernon Davis Convertible Tracking Stock –sec.gov

The Hard Thing about Family Holidays

Elaine, don’t you want to settle down soon?

Every. single. fricken. year.

The hard thing about settling down is the “settling” part. Settling! A settlement is a concession, an admission that you’re not gonna get what you want and it’s time to cut your losses. No, you’re not going to become the cowboy-astronaut-millionaire you dreamed up as a 10-year-old. You’re not gonna marry one either.

So you settle for being not consistently miserable because you’re not sure what you want anymore anyway.

There’s a good part. It turns out no one is actually paying attention. No one cares about your broken dreams or that you once planned to be Master of the Universe. You pretend you just always wanted to be a claims adjuster or an app developer. Life gets easier once you accept a settlement.

The Risk of Bitcoin Money Laundering

My office has been proudly circulating this document that shows Digital Currencies as having low risk of money laundering and terrorist financing.

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The study explains the low risk rating:

There is little evidence to indicate that the use of digital currencies has been incorporated into established money laundering techniques.

There is little evidence to indicate that the use of digital currencies has been adopted by criminals involved in terrorist financing, whether as a means by which to raise funds (crowd funding etc.), to pay for infrastructure (e.g. server rental), or to transfer funds.

The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence! In fact, a primary goal of money laundering is to not leave behind a bunch of evidence. (The other goal is to minimize the loss of funds in the process.)

Regardless of evidence, is Bitcoin an effective method for laundering money? My whole company had to undergo anti-money laundering compliance training, so I fancy myself an expert.

Proper laundry conceals the nature, location, source, ownership, and control of illegally-obtained money. Bitcoin is great for this. Mixing services can break up and recombine funds with numerous sources to render the transactions untraceable. One high-volume Bitcoin mixer claims to have processed over $20M last month.

But that’s not a lot. Bitcoin has an average daily transaction volume of maybe $100M. Money-laundering was a $1.2 trillion market in 2009, and likely much larger today. Even if Bitcoin transactions were wholly dedicated to laundering money, it would capture less than 2% of the market.

So not only is Bitcoin a poor payment solution and a terrible store of value, it’s also unscalable for money laundering.

Still an excellent vehicle for speculation though.