Co-Founder @equitybee. Husband to Neta-Lee. Father to Tommy, Dani and Rae.
Palo Alto, California
Joined April 2009
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1/ When a company feels the need to explicitly warn people not to use its product for something, that's usually a pretty good sign that lots of people are already doing exactly that.
That's how I read this ChatGPT disclaimer.
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At @EquityBee , we’ve facilitated the option exercise of thousands of startup employees.
Looking at these transactions over time revealed an interesting story: which banks startup employees use as their primary bank account.
We decided to share the data 👇
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A few other interesting findings:
• Charles Schwab ranks #4 - these clients already think like investors.
• Other major banks are nearly absent from the list.
• Neobanks have almost no meaningful representation, despite positioning themselves to serve this audience.
These clients are today’s HENRYs and tomorrow’s HNWIs.
Analysis + methodology: equitybee.com/employees-lp/w…
Took a road trip from SF to LA with Full Self-Driving on. Calling it ‘driving’ is like calling using Claude Code ‘coding’.
Probably one of the best and insightful episodes of all times
Stewart Butterfield (@stewart) rarely does interviews. After 2 years of trying, I finally convinced him to come on.
In this special conversation, Stewart shares the frameworks and mental models that most helped him build two of the most important products in tech history (@Flickr, and @SlackHQ—which he sold for $28B, and which powers how basically every company collaborates these days).
We discuss:
🔸 "Utility curves" — his framework for prioritizing ideas
🔸 "The owner's delusion" — why restaurant websites suck
🔸 "Tilting your umbrella" — a hilarious Slack core value
🔸 "Hyper-realistic work-like activities" — my new favorite concept
🔸 "Don't make me think" — Stewart's foundational design philosophy
🔸 The story behind "We don't sell saddles here"
Listen now 👇
• YouTube: youtu.be/kLe-zy5r0Mk
• Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/42J…
• Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast:
🏆 @WorkOS — Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs: workos.com/lenny
🏆 @getmetronome — Monetization infrastructure for modern software companies: metronome.com/
🏆 @Lovable — Build apps by simply chatting with AI: lovable.com
Christmas is the perfect time to unsubscribe from all the companies wishing me Merry Christmas that I forgot I ever signed up for 🎄📧
The world doesn't need another Lovable. It makes sense in some cases like Figma Make if it can use the existing design system, or in Shopify if it connects to the existing backend, but other than that, we got the point.
Oded Golan retweeted
“I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes" - that’s what everybody told me. At some point I started to doubt myself. Now we are winning again.
In the last 12 months, Equitybee grew 6x. Every quarter has set a new record. We’ve outperformed our optimistic projections, all while operating at just ~30% of our former team size and cost. More efficient. More focused. Accelerating.
But just a couple of years ago, it wasn’t working and we needed to turn the company around.
It was hard, it was painful and maybe the hardest thing I have ever done.
Early 2023, after the bubble burst, our investor community went silent, gross margins turned negative, and we were bleeding cash. I made the brutal decision to lay off many great team members, not once but twice within 3 months.
I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I kept waking up worrying about everything… our team, the employees we funded, the investors who funded them and trusted Equitybee, and the investors who trusted me and invested in Equitybee.
I questioned myself, and our fundamental assumptions. We went back to first principles:
1. Do startup employees need Equitybee? - YES. Way more employees than we can handle, from the best companies kept approaching Equitybee seeking funding, and we have and still are part of nearly every major IPO and M&A.
2. Is it a good investment? YES. Equitybee has delivered 30%+ net realized IRR, and in DPI terms Equitybee outperformed the top 10% US funds across all vintages since inception (that’s still true for today - in the past 7 vintage years).
3. Can we secure investors at scale to fund these employees? This became our focus.
First principle thinking helped us to regain the needed confidence and to be laser focused on #3, and leverage our unique strengths and track record to build a new institutional grade product - the Venture Market Fund (more details soon). Launched late 2023 and everything accelerated from there.
Today, we’re growing faster than ever, more efficiently than ever, and delivering on our mission to empower startup employees.
It’s still hard. Startups are hard. Clarity, focus, and first-principle thinking turned everything around. We are building something great @odedgolan @EquityBee
