I go with this approach for all my personal tools and find it much easier to use and have CC or any LLM reason how to use the tools, and the added benefit that it has a super small footprint in context. https://gist.github.com/Shehryar/22059e16ba70a42fc72c13fde9f...
I have for a lot of my own tools and personal stuff a slightly different approach with this that doesn't use MCP. If you combine skills, with a thin CLI for any API you get a dramatically cheaper version of an MCP and with all the benefits of it just being a simple CLI. Most of the time if I have something like Linear or Hubspot, I just point it at the actual API docs and ask the LLM to make a thin CLI for that API. That way I don't have to load tools for the CLI until needed by a slash command, but the definitions are also tiny so my context stays mostly free.
First love seeing more Pakistani founders! And second - this is super interesting (I'm a first generation kid - parents also came from Pakistan) my parents basically route this all through trusted family right now, have property back home they manage, and this could have made everything WAY simpler.
Congrats on the launch and excited to see where this goes!
I don't know specifically about Pakistan, but at least in India the returns on real estate are very good, especially in second-tier cities.
So many people, only so much land. Rising incomes and steady urbanization. Yada yada yada.
Also, part of it is just culture. I know that people in my parents' generation are not very comfortable investing in the stock market. Real estate is seen as a safe investment with a steady, if low, rental yield.
It is also a mindset of many immigrants: always have a backup plan. My parents have lived outside of Pakistan for over 40 years and recently moved to the USA. In all that time they always had a home back in Pakistan and kept investing in more property. I am sure this is the case with immigrants from most other countries also.
I am a younger immigrant and plan on doing exactly that.
One big part of the "oh shit, let's go back" plan is that it's usually so much cheaper to set things in your country of origin. Some real estate, some investments and you're set for life for a fraction of what it costs in a more expensive country. Or, alternatively, you can see this as an arbitrage: get income in a high income country, spend it in a low income country. For example, just three of my monthly salaries are larger than the median net worth back home. Think if you wouldn't try to exploit such massive inequality yourself.
Only thing I dont get: why not save / invest otherwise & buy there when youre "sure" youll use it? I think the norm is already to sell properties of 20 years later, realizing they wont or cant really be used and having quite large missed revenues due to it. Why e.g. have a huge house & use it 2 weeks a year max?
This is true! Most money can be made where no one is looking that closely :) but of course there is a larger risk for smaller companies and single, rather developing countries (expect for maybe the US which is hard to hit hard without also affecting any other market)
Well, it is natural because those countries have a lot higher risk profile. Meaning, their stocks could make 2-3 extra percents per year but this is the price of risk of something really bad when they go to zero, say Taliban takeover, or Communist revolution, or a hot war with India...
And yet it's the US that has >5% inflation rate and the long bond around 1%. Every country can become a banana republic, you know.
Also, I agree with the consensus on the risk level ordering, but it's not just the risk, it's the reward too. High priced securities offer no (or even negative) reward in the optimistic outcome scenario.
It's way cheaper to retire back in the home country after you've made your money in the states. A side benefit is that you can rent out the property before retirement which nets you a small income and keeps the property maintained. My in-laws own about a dozen properties in the Philippines, half of which they rent out, and a couple are being used by their kids. Collectively they make enough from the rentals to get by.
It's not a rental but the returns on just the plots of land have been good. Their original idea was to retire back home and build a family compound. That's changed since but they still have some of the properties. More and more of the country is getting modern developments and so the return on these has been pretty good.
In South Asia, land is at a premium due to high population. You can buy basically any piece of land anywhere and its value rises a lot each year. My father-in-law owns swampland in South Asia which is still rising in value despite being a huge burden to actually develop.
In addition, property ownership is limited in a way it is not in the West (only citizens can own property, as an example, in India), so it's an advantage you want to retain as a migrant over non-natives.
It's also because more land can be farmed, and thus farming is still a very valid option to earn income for small land owner.
You can't make any money with a 10000 kanal plot in Russia.
In Pakistan, you can't buy 10000 kanal plot for any money, such big plots are almost never sold. An average person can live a carefree life with a cash cow plot 10 times smaller.
1000 kanal plot reasonably close to a major city in Pakistan will cost in tens of millions, and are very rare finds.
That 90-day expiry window is the most archaic bullshit. Can't come up with 200K cash? Too bad, and thanks for all that hard work and long hours you put in.
FWIW it's rooted in US tax law. Unexercised Incentive Stock Options (ISOs) are required to expire 90 days after an employee leaves.
The way some companies get around it is that, after 90 days, they replace the expired ISOs with nonstatutory stock options which, as their name implies, are not recognized by the tax code. Tax code is complicated but NSOs are ultimately worth maybe 10%-20% less than "equivalent" ISOs.
But, at least until recently, there wasn't standard paperwork for doing this, so the only companies that did it were those willing to innovate on their stock plan. I think a lot of founders weren't trying to screw their employees, but their lawyers weren't comfortable going off the beaten path.
But I think that excuse is fading now. Enough companies have done it to provide precedent.
My circa-2015 startup looked at this and fretted a bit but ultimately sidestepped the problem by giving everyone restricted stock instead of options. That's only really possible at the very early stages when the 409(a) valuation is nearly zero. But for anyone joining a seed-stage startup today, that's what I strongly recommend: Ask for restricted stock, and if the purchase cost is non-zero, ask them to comp you for it as a signing bonus (which is "free" for them since they're buying the stock from themselves). You'll have to pay income tax on the value but that should be pretty small (maybe you can even get the company to "gross it up", but that's real dollars for them). Then you'll never have to worry about exercising stock options or paying AMT. Don't forget to file your 83(b) election within 30 days.
Obvious disclaimer: I'm not a tax specialist. You should not rely on tax advice found in an internet comment. I probably got some stuff wrong below.
When you exercise an ISO, it is not considered regular taxable income. It is as if you legitimately purchased the stock on the market for that price. No tax is due until you sell. If you sell immediately then you pay regular income tax on the gain. But if you hold it for at least a year, then you pay long-term capital gains rate, which maxes out at 20% (vs. 37% for regular income tax).
When you exercise an NSO, the gain is considered income and is immediately taxable at regular income tax rates, whether you sell it or not. If the company is not public, then you can't sell share to pay the taxes, so if you're going to exercise NSOs, you'd better do it either before the valuation has gone up much (in which case you end up paying mostly long-term capital gains tax), or wait until after IPO (and pay regular income tax). Since investing in startups is very very risky, exercising early probably isn't the right choice for most regular people.
Extra complication: The US has two tax codes that exist in a sort of quantum superposition. Each taxpayer must pay whichever tax bill is larger of the two. The above describes the regular tax code, but there is also Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). Under AMT, ISOs are not special; they are treated like NSOs. But, the maximum tax rate under AMT is 28% rather than 37%, and doesn't kick in until higher income levels. So if you exercise ISOs before the company has gone public, but after the valuation has raised significantly over the exercise price, you might again have trouble paying the taxes. But if you manage to pay them, and you manage to hold for a year, your overall gain will probably be 10%-20% more than what you would have gotten with NSOs.
Extra extra complication: Let's say you exercise your ISOs before IPO and you manage to pay the AMT. Years later, you sell the stock. Is your capital gains computed based on the ISO exercise price, or the valuation at exercise? BOTH! Under regular income tax, you owe capital gains on everything since the exercise price, but under AMT you already paid for the gains between the exercise price and the valuation at exercise. If you don't want to get double-taxed you have to learn what it means to take a credit for a timing-based AMT adjustment. This is well beyond the point where Turbo Tax gets pretty unhelpful and you probably need to get a CPA, but in the Bay Area there are so many rich clients that a decent CPA will charge thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of dollars to do your taxes. Have fun!
All that said, if your plan is to exercise-and-sell in one action sometime after IPO, then I think ISO vs. NSO doesn't make much difference.
You got everything right, but in my experience TurboTax handles the AMT credit just fine. I personally recouped 6 figures of credit carried over across multiple years, and TurboTax always automatically calculated the usable credit every year, and when I ultimately sold the exercised shares it also properly computed the different AMT cost basis, allowing me to recoup even more that year due to the higher spread.
I would still recommend folks to properly understand what it is and how it is calculated so they can double check the numbers, but that really applies to pretty much every tax form.
I guess it's gotten better. I remember a time when they asked you to please just enter a number for your timing-based AMT adjustments without even giving you a hint what that is. Admittedly that was a long long time ago.
Is there a website that contains all of this information in one place? Could any founder be expected to know about the 409(a) and 83(b) without a lawyer?
Not sure about the first question, but as to the second: If you are starting a startup, especially for the first time, you absolutely need to get a good startup lawyer. Ours* charged $500/hr and was worth every penny. Saved our asses many times.
Another thing that may be hard to understand for non-US citizens. For me, exercising options costs me just that, the option price + bank fees; I owe no tax. I have to pay full tax when & if I sell the shares. This seems like a much fairer taxation regime - I pay tax when I earn something - just having un-sellable shares didn't suddenly increase my wealth.
With this, it actually makes sense to exercise options and stay employed at the startup: you now may not be qualified as a short-term seller when you sell the stock, since you held on to it for a while.
One should exercise at the earliest possible convenience. If I'd exercised on day 1 when I joined a startup, I wouldn't have owed tax because I wasn't getting a discount, but a locked-in price. So when I exercised after the value increased, I then owed tax.
I've seen it suggested that one should exercise on day 1. But that doesn't have to mean you pay for them immediately (after all, you don't get to keep them immediately - you have to wait for vesting...), so you work out a payment plan with deductions every paycheck so that you've pay fully for whatever is vested at the time it vests.
Or one should never exercise at all until an acquisition or an IPO happens.
I've seen too many people exercise stock options trying to minimize tax implications down the road, only to see them eventually leave the company for any number of reasons and they end up get heavily diluted to almost nothing in future rounds. All that money basically down the drain trying to chase long term capital gains vs regular income tax rates when the likelihood that they'll make anything is extremely low.
Everyone's risk posture is different, but considering how few startups are actually successful, I would argue it's better to just assume the options are worthless and just deal with the regular income tax situation if you get lucky enough to be around during an IPO or acquisition.
You're definitely correct. "Convenience" is emphasized. If it's not convenient to exercise, don't; wait until a liquidity event.
This makes me curious: what's the total typically required to purchase one's options (not including the potential tax implications)? Does it vary wildly from a couple thousand to tens- or hundreds-of-thousands? Lottery ticket money, or significant fractions of annual income?
IBM stopped working on their own framework Kitura. Vapor has become the dominant framework since then and Apple is still investing more in making server-side Swift better. I have heard rumors that Netflix is running some services using server-side Swift, obviously unconfirmed.
Re Alex Jones: The targeted and continual harassment of the parents of Sandy Hook victims is definitely dangerous. Not to even mention the promotion of the pizza gate conspiracy which inspired someone to walk into a pizza place with an assault weapon. Different types of danger but still danger.
For what it's worth, Alex Jones retracted his Sandy Hook reaction years ago and apologized. Since then he has repeatedly scolded his followers telling listeners not to harass the parents. Same with the specific pizza restaurant. The damage is already done, of course, but it is not continual.
There is a recent long-form interview on Joe Rogan where you can hear it from himself - the beginning is focused on his apology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5yh2HcIlkU
I actually used to work for a company where we did exactly that. We did it based off of in game footage that we would stat and annotate it was a really interesting product. I think Second Spectrum does something similar now for pro basketball teams.
