kchodorow

The surprisingly complex math behind startup equity and taxes

Taxes for employees at startups are weird and can vastly change the amount you make. To illustrate why, let’s take a simple example. Suppose we have a group of early employees at a startup, we’ll call them the Unicorn Inc. Mafia. They’re all fresh out of college and managed to get through it without anyContinue reading “The surprisingly complex math behind startup equity and taxes”

Goals for 2019

Followup from last year’s post: Programming: I really dug into Pandas and not I feel pretty comfy with Python & Pandas. This year, I’d like to focus a bit more on stats and machine learning. Work-life balance: I am freakin obsessed with my job, which is terrific. But I also feel comfy taking days offContinue reading “Goals for 2019”

AST Financial: the dumpster fire of a company

As an employee at MongoDB for several years, I had a bunch of shares that MongoDB was holding for me when it went public which I had to get to my brokerage account to actually sell. It turns out that the company can’t just hand you your shares, they have to go through a transferContinue reading “AST Financial: the dumpster fire of a company”

Thinking with Pandas

You can see and run all of my work for this blog post at Colabratory. Pandas is a Python library for manipulating data. Wrapping my head around it took a while: I’ve been using it for ~6 months and I’m still learning how to use it “right.” It uses all kinds of syntactic sugar toContinue reading “Thinking with Pandas”

GV

Quick update: I’m now a partner at Google Ventures! I’m still doing engineering (although I would love to hear about it if you know about any cool startups I should check out) and I’m really enjoying being back at Google.

Staying out of trouble on Elastic Beanstalk

Editor’s note: devops always makes me cranky and Domino is in the doggy hospital (he’s okay), so have a rant about Elastic Beanstalk. This is my life: If you’re unfamiliar with Elastic Beanstalk: healthy is green, unhealthy is red, and grey is unreachable. Grey is the worst, because it’s inescapable: you can’t change the configurationContinue reading “Staying out of trouble on Elastic Beanstalk”

The thing about renting an apartment in NYC

There’s a lot of weird stuff about NYC real estate and this post attempts to cover some of the things that I’ve experienced. I’ve spent years renting apartments in NYC, mostly from rather small-time landlords with pre-war, rent stabilized buildings. If you’re looking for luxury rentals in new construction, a lot of this advice probablyContinue reading “The thing about renting an apartment in NYC”

A self-indulgent post for a self-indulgent day

I think how I feel around holidays is a good barometer for how my life is going. For example, last year over the winter vacation, I just wanted to stay there forever and dreaded returning to “real life.” By contrast, year’s winter vacation I had a lot of fun, but I was looking forward toContinue reading “A self-indulgent post for a self-indulgent day”

Goals for 2018

A list of things that I think are doable that I’d like to accomplish over the next year: Become as good at Node.js as I am at other languages. I’ve been very impressed by the community so far and EcmaScript 6 is very interesting. I think I’m on track for good work/life balance, but makeContinue reading “Goals for 2018”

IPOs, 101

When a friend IM’d me and told me she saw an article saying that MongoDB had filed for IPO, I embarked on a months-long journey of discovering that I knew nothing about IPOs. I found it a bit difficult to get information about them, so I figured I’d write up what I learned. This isContinue reading “IPOs, 101”