Living It

Rarely see gas lights anymore. Earlier today, workers were putting mantles on the lamps.

According to Crain’s,

The company’s first 10 employees will receive an average of $6.2 million in cash; the first 30 will receive an average of $3.3 million in cash, and the rest of the 178 employees will each receive $371,000.

This is good money that anyone would be thrilled to get, but I was surprised it was not more on a $1.1 billion exit. Although if you do the math, that’s about half of one percent ownership for the first 10 employees, which is probably pretty typical.

It goes to show you that the startup dream of fantastic wealth is extremely hard to obtain. There aren’t many $1 billion+ exits and while $6 million is thrilling and life changing, it’s not retire-for-the-rest-of-your-life-and-spend-money-as-you-wish kind of money. Tumblr employee #2 confirms that. And for the rest of the 178 employees? They can at least pay for the kids to go to college.

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen this man spin. However, the experience is nowhere near the same as it was in the early 2000’s seeing him at Twilo. Still good, but I miss the full on techno.

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So, Posterous, where I hosted my blog for the past 3 years, was acquired by Twitter and was shut down at the end of the last month. Sigh.

Of course I waited until the last moment to check out the alternatives. There is a Posterous clone called Posthaven, but it’s lacking a lot of features and I didn’t want to wait for them. Square Space was feature rich, and I would have moved there, but it has dumb defaults for creating new posts by email, which is what I do most of the time. Tumblr… I think I missed the boat for that. So here I am on WordPress.com after importing 877 posts.

One cool new feature – you can subscribe to my pictures and notes via email. Stick your email in that box in the right margin. Mom, Pop, that is perfect for you, since I know you rarely stop by.

While I think WordPress will stay independent longer than Posterous, I thought it’d be better to buy my own domain name in case I ever need or want to move again. Where did I come up with LivingIt.us? That’s me spending all of 5 minutes trying to find an available name. Depending on the moment, I could be living the dream, the nightmare, or just the day to day. Don’t get hung up on any particular interpretation.

Since I’m switching up my look, I thought I’d try out a new, snappier twitter name, @hitom. That may not last, but I’m going with it for now.