grant

So, if you get your 100,000 share grant at $.01/sh, and you pay $.01 share, you pay no tax at inception.

That is a huge grant of personal information no one should have to make.

I'll grant you that maps looks nicer and nicer, but it becomes less and less usable at an alarming speed.

See, iTunes will scan your music and try to guess what music you have, and then grant you access to the iTunes Store copies of it.

They were complaining about how it says "you own your photos but you grant us the rights to do anything with them up to selling them.

And yet any essay that discusses the incentive structure of science but doesn't use the word "grant" until the last sentence is beating around the bush.

There's also the matter of dilution: is he protected against dilution from investor and employee stock grants over the next N years?

In a normal scandal story, the appropriate committee would grant immunity to Snowden, have him testify, then bring up Clapper, have him testify, and compare notes.

Moreover, early exercise is not possible if your options haven't vested unless you specifically get an early exercise privilege as part of your grant.

Thus, you will have the tax complications that attend an equity funding, including needing to price your stock and option grants based on the $1 million company valuation and the need to do 409A valuations.

PG has assessed the broad economic proposition to which I would add the following: YC does take an immediate equity grant but does so with common stock and on terms that don't affect founder stock pricing.

The process goes: Carve off a problem, write some code, produce plot, publish paper, put figure-indicative-of-progress into grant renewal application.

With such a time-based performance incentive, which is what is called "restricted stock", you own the stock up front and you pay no tax at the time of purchase in the normal case where the amount you pay for it equals its fair value on the date of the grant.

Like with anything else, the question isn't whether the rich will be able to afford it, the question is how much progress can we make in making it cheap, how quickly, to get it to how many people?It is a moral imperative to make sure that short-sighted class warfare does not cut off the nose to spite the face by destroying this work under the guise of egalitarianism, because we can not turn on a dime and immediately grant it to everyone on day one. Yes, the rich will get it first.

It also means you create tax risks and complications: if the equity round is too near the time of formation, the $.0001/sh pricing used by founders for their shares may look funny next to the much higher amount per share paid by investors, raising risks that the founders can be deemed to have received their shares at the higher valuation as potentially taxable service income; once you do an equity round, you will need to do 409A valuations in connection with doing option grants and that necessitates getting outside independent appraisals; equity rounds come with strings, including investor preferences, investor protective provisions limiting what you can do as a founder without investor approval, co-sale and first refusal rights favoring investors and concomitantly limiting founders, board seats and/or observer rights for investors, and the like.