Top all-time · #832
Alex MacCaw
Personal blog · blog.alexmaccaw.comprogrammingstartups
Alex MacCaw's personal blog at blog.alexmaccaw.com covers programming and startups. Since 2012, 78 different Hacker News readers have linked it 123 times, most often “An Engineer’s guide to Stock Options”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-05-24, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (25) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Alex MacCaw's blog mainly for his engineer-oriented guide to startup stock options, and for posts on Stripe's culture, Node generators and a browser payments API.
- Recommended for · 7 comments
- Stock options guide called a good read that covers the basics in excellent detail and is suggested reading.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 25 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Musings about life, the universe, and everything.
Most-linked posts?
- An Engineer’s guide to Stock Options6 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2013-12-10
- An Engineer’s Guide to Stock Options5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-08-03
- Humble Beginnings3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-12-17
- An Asynchronous Image Uploading Interface for Svbtle3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-08-08
- How yield will transform Node.js3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-07-19
- How to travel around the world for a year2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-06-21
- What it’s like to work for Stripe (2012)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-08-28
- Unshackling Artificial Minds2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-11-23
- Alex MacCaw: Advice to my younger self2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-11-01
- 5 APIs that will transform the Web in 20132 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-11-30
What Hacker News says?
Great post by Sam. For employees, I'd also refer to Alex MacCaw's An Engineer’s guide to Stock Options [1]. Alex used to work at Stripe, and at the end of his article he shares some intersting bits of stock tax alternative not covered by Sam: If you can’t afford to exercise your right to buy your vested shares (or don’t want to take the risk) then there’s no need to despair – there are still alternatives. There are…
Comment linking /an-engineers-guide-to-stock-options
on “Employee Equity”Submitted An Engineer’s guide to Stock Options as a story · 738 points
HN discussionI'm impressed that Stripe has been able to maintain it's culture over the years, as it grows in headcount and size. I recall reading this blog from 2012 (although I read it in 2014): https://blog.alexmaccaw.com/stripes-culture And the consistency between then and now is fairly impressive. Ambition and Optimism seem like codified values that have emerged over time. But the one thread that is consistent is their thoug…
Comment linking /stripes-culture
on “Lessons from Stripe”Submitted Small as a story · 351 points
HN discussionThere are several options one must weigh when they are deciding on job offers. Where you work is so important and yet so many people seem to put such little effort into negotiation, risk assessment, runway, overall comp, etc. etc. If you're taking equity in place of a market rate salary you better to be absolutely 100% sure you know you're taking a massive risk and forfeiting real dollars for hypothetical dollars th…
Comment linking /an-engineers-guide-to-stock-options
on “When a Unicorn Startup Stumbles, Its Employees Get Hurt”Submitted What it’s like to work for Stripe as a story · 285 points
HN discussionDon't feel bad. The issue here is the relationship with the company & Carta and overall corporate concerns, not much about employee equity. Briefly: - In a startup you're granted options. Contract that allows you to buy certain amount of company shares at a specific price (”strike price”, also known as “exercise price”), which is usually the fair market price at the time when your options are granted. Options do not…
Comment linking /an-engineers-guide-to-stock-options/
on “Carta doing unsolicited tender offer outreach to their customers' investors”Submitted Monocle as a story · 264 points
HN discussionOne way: It leverages generators, which helps in avoiding callback hell ( http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/how-yield-will-transform-node ) Koa is written by the same author as express.
Comment linking /how-yield-will-transform-node
on “Koa – Next-generation web framework for Node.js”Submitted An Engineer’s Guide to Stock Options (2013) as a story · 249 points
HN discussionYes, it's called "JavaScript". Specifically, combining generators with promises. http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/how-yield-will-transform-node Definitely not as clean as a whole new language, but you can program like this today, at least in bleeding edge node and some recent browsers.
Comment linking /how-yield-will-transform-node
on “Kal – a clean JavaScript alternative without callbacks”Submitted How to travel around the world for a year as a story · 243 points
HN discussionWell, maybe. Alex works at Stripe. And wrote about having a browser API for payments. http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/one-click-signups-and-purchasing
Comment linking /one-click-signups-and-purchasing
on “APIs that will transform the Web in 2013”Submitted APIs that will transform the Web in 2013 as a story · 231 points
HN discussionI really like this one: https://blog.alexmaccaw.com/an-engineers-guide-to-stock-opti...
Comment linking /an-engineers-guide-to-stock-options
on “A Guide to Employee Equity”Submitted Rails is just an API as a story · 184 points
HN discussionOr Saigon - had a great time there. http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/traveling-writing-and-programming
Comment linking /traveling-writing-and-programming
on “What I learnt bootstrapping my startup from Thailand for six months”Submitted Setting up Sublime Text 2 as a story · 178 points
HN discussionKejia Zhu ( http://kzhu.net/does-life-end-at-35.html ) helped me to get through the delusional obsession for quick success. I gave it to read to all my friends and it's definitely a must for all HN folks. The good ol' Raymond's How to Become a Hacker ( http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html ) will teach you the Hacker attitude, which you can apply to anything. It doesn't matter whether you're a programmer o…
Comment linking /how-to-travel-around-the-world-for-a-year/
on “Ask HN: What are the most inspirational blog posts you've ever read?”Submitted Open sourcing all my private projects as a story · 176 points
HN discussionAlex McCaw mentioned in Clearbit's launch post earlier this year that Svbtle is using their API to auto populate their sign up form: http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/clearbit My guess is that Magic is using Clearbit's API as a base, then layering on their own scraped data sources as well, which is a pretty common strategy for these types of APIs.
Comment linking /clearbit
on “Magic – Completes signup forms automatically, with just an email address”Submitted Open-sourcing Stylo as a story · 156 points
HN discussionHi, I'm the co-founder of Sourcing.io, and the engineer who built it. Stoked that we're on HN, and get the chance to respond to the engineering and hacker community. Our introduction blog post says a bit more about our mission. http://blog.sourcing.io/hello-world Believe it or not, I hate 'spam' recruiting emails as much as the next engineer. This is how I feel about them: http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/recruiting-email…
Comment linking /recruiting-emails
on “Sourcing.io”Submitted Resumes are dangerous? as a story · 150 points
HN discussionIt's a great policy. Stripe was doing this 2 years ago: http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/stripes-culture Anyone know if they still do it, even after growing?
Comment linking /stripes-culture
on “Why We Do All-Hands Support at Olark”Submitted Here’s to the Misfits as a story · 147 points
HN discussionCan anybody share some info on how taking stock options in a US company differs from a UK one? A lot of the reading applies to US market. I'm wondering if any of the advice is not transferrable. Also, I believe that this is a good read - https://blog.alexmaccaw.com/an-engineers-guide-to-stock-opti...
Comment linking /an-engineers-guide-to-stock-options
on “Ask HN: Is it just me or do a lot of people not know how stock options work?”Submitted Humble Beginnings as a story · 144 points
HN discussionexplanation of stock options generally - http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/an-engineers-guide-to-stock-optio...
Comment linking /an-engineers-guide-to-stock-options
on “Hiring a Startup Lawyer”Submitted Chrome’s requestAutocomplete() as a story · 130 points
HN discussion
