Are you claiming that, for any fraction x of traffic that must be dropped, overall subscriber utility is completely independent of what type of traffic is dropped?
Modafinil is Schedule IV in the US. The law may or may not be enforced with respect with to Modafinil, but possessing that drug without a prescription is illegal.
This is going to give you biased results. Consider what would happen if you used the same method to determine the life expectancy of computer programmers.
People have been talking about rentec for a long time, and their gains are larger than would be expected if they were merely the most lucky of a large group of random investments.
It's a little early to declare mission accomplished. The IPO hasn't actually happened yet. It will be hard to know if limited shareholder supervision reduces the value of the company. But if the IPO is a bust, a lot of people will wonder.
If the company is successful, they will pay a dividend or do a buyback later. For example, Facebook raised $16B in its IPO, and recently bought back $6B worth of shares at about 4 times the IPO price. The IPO was a great deal for common shareholders, despite their lack of control. Perversely, the comparison to Facebook might bias people to pay more for Snapchat shares with no voting power.
I know someone that was offered ~$800k in equity late last year. If the stock stays at the target IPO price (big if), that's a million right there. I would guess that a large portion of engineers could earn >$1M.
>The recruiter took me to another room and asked me what my salary expectations were. I told him my current salary and he said that it was a little high for their base pay and that they prefer to under pay on base but overcompensate with stock.
Don't tell the recruiter your current salary! You can only lose by doing that.
If your current salary were 50% larger, they would also have told you that it was a little high for the base pay and all the numbers they offered would be scaled up.
What you should is tell them you expect some optimistic but possible number (250k-500k/year total annual comp depending on your seniority) and negotiate from there.
Even if your current salary is great, you should still only tell them if they offer a lower number first.
Of course, you weren't going to take this job anyway, but the same advice applies at companies you actually like. A big offer from Uber would be a great tool for other negotiations.
A company that accumulated enough cash could, in theory, buy out its investors. This would allow an impatient VC fund to return cash without involving any other party. Not sure if a VC-backed startup has ever done this.