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”
Category Archives: Uncategorized
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.
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”
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”
A magic trick
I was standing on the street corner with Domino and a group of schoolkids came up. “Hey, can I show you a magic trick?” one of them asked. “Uh…” “Think of a number,” he said. “Ok.” “Now add 4 to it.” “Ok.” “Now add 5 to it.” “Ok.” “Now add 1 to it.” “Ok.” “NowContinue reading “A magic trick”
P.T. Barnum on salary vs. equity
I’ve been reading P.T. Barnum’s autobiography and came across an interesting passage about when he was employed at Mr. Taylor’s (maybe of Lord & Taylor’s? Not sure) shop: My employer manifested great interest in me, and treated me with the upmost kindness, but the situation did not suit me. The fact is, there are someContinue reading “P.T. Barnum on salary vs. equity”
The next great frontier in ML: dogs in hats
I’ve been messing around with Keras, a ML library that makes it pretty easy to do AI experiments. I decided to try out image recognition, so I found a picture of Domino in a fez: Then I wrote the following Python program which uses the existing ResNet50 image recognition library. import numpy as np fromContinue reading “The next great frontier in ML: dogs in hats”
GitHub notification… notifier
Here is what my inbox look like each morning: All those pink-tagged messages are emails from GitHub. Gmail cannot figure out which ones are important and GitHub’s notification stream, in my experience, is useless. It’s noisy and doesn’t clear the way I’d expect. The problem is, people actually do mention me on bugs. And IContinue reading “GitHub notification… notifier”
Kristina Chodorow's Blog 