u/NoProfessional4650

Hey folks,

Does anyone know what Notion levels map to in the standard career ladder?

My question is whether L4 is senior or staff?

Thanks!

Hey folks… need your help thinking about two offers.

First one is Notion. Really enjoyed meeting the team, the domain is something I’m familiar with and the culture / people are really nice. Ivan himself interviewed me at the end and left a very good impression on me (and him). He gave me his phone number and he texted me which I was very flattered by.

Roughly. $700k TC: $275 base / $410 equity / $27.5 bonus / $50k signing

The second one is a lot trickier… it’s an AI infra startup whose thesis is focused on building a data harness / system of record for decisions. The founders are incredibly legit and kind. One was a well known AI researcher at FAANG / OpenAI and wrote some foundational papers on RAG. The other was a product director at FAANG on core AI inference products. Both were former founders of a successful AI company. Company has $1M+ ARR right now and is in talks with large F100 companies to deploy agents with very sizable contract values. The team is fantastic, clearly super smart and very hungry. Their investors are legit too (GV, Gradient, Accel, Sequoia).

Offer is $300k base + 0.8% of the fully diluted share count. They already raised around $20m as a seed and are in stealth.

I’m really struggling because Notion seems like a really solid offer and a great brand / company. But the asymmetric upside + legit founders + strong offer + genuinely cutting edge work at the startup are hard to ignore.

Curious to get some feedback. 10 YOE.

Was listening to Martin Shkreli speak on TBPN and he was saying that he was one of the first people who learned about SA’s margin call.

He was saying as HFs found that SA was over leveraged and close to a margin call, they started selling off all overlapping positions (MU, SNDK, NBIS) and took short positions in an effort to liquidate him.

Citadel apparently got the entire public book at a $3BN discount. Fucking insane.

Not going to sugarcoat it, this past 5 weeks has been a fucking bloodbath. I’m thankful I took some profits earlier but still down $800k from the peak (net positive overall) and I’m still holding a substantial position in MUU.

I wanted to say the MSFT earnings call was absolutely critical for us. The big FUD around the market was squarely pointed at this AI supercycle being unsustainable. That means capex > FCF. Dipping into debt and equity markets etc.

MSFT today demonstrated that its capex investments are directly translating to FCF. Held capex flat yet beat on FCF ontop of incredible cloud growth.

I’ve been panicking the past 2-3 weeks, but listening to Satya and Amy speak at length about the health of the business, the BREADTH of demand (all RPO additions this quarter were non-OpenAI) and monetization of their services gave me a lot of confidence.

They showed us that demand isn’t just from a handful of compute hungry AI labs, it’s broad based around their existing corporate customers. That’s the true tell of structural demand, and thank god Satya drove that point home hard. Satya also made it clear they’re selling outcomes, not tokens. Again — exactly what Wall Street and their customers wanted to hear. This is where the real value in AI comes from — driving measurable business outcomes. MSFT is the best positioned to deliver that given their customer base is all of corporate America.

You’ll also note Microsoft didn’t provide FY27 capex guidance. I think that was a very smart decision. The narrative FUD cuts both ways — if you raise, then people freak out about spending. If you don’t raise, then are you falling behind on AI? See the contradictions here? Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

MSFT thread the needle masterfully and every hyperscaler should take note. Massive, sustained investment that’s yielding real cash. That’s the dream print and directly attacks the biggest bear argument — that this is unsustainable.

MSFT showed us they’re just getting started.

Just curious if anyone here moved after they FI’d?

I recently got an offer to join a tech company in Tokyo for a total compensation package of ¥15m as an engineer.

I was very lucky with my investments and aggressive savings so my NW is about $4m. It’s certainly a lot here (SF) and I’m assuming it’s basically full financial independence in Tokyo?

The job would be more of a change of scenery type of move for me but yeah I was wondering if any of you are in a similar situation?

I’m a 31 year old single male. Incidentally my biggest concern is actually finding a partner lol, I heard dating is hard in Japan if you don’t speak Japanese?

Curious to see if any folks moved from the Bay Area (and especially those of you who worked in tech) — it’s becoming a fairly common transition in my own circle but wanted to get your thoughts. For me it’s mostly been positive but some caveats.

Pros:
- walkable cities, excellent public transit
- electric city atmosphere
- everyone’s polite and courteous
- very affordable especially with the yen even in an upscale neighborhood (I live in Daikanyama)
- extremely picturesque.. sometimes I still pinch myself that I live here

Cons:
- took a massive pay cut to come here (-50-70%)
- might be my own bias but I feel like I’ve effectively stepped out of the cutting edge? My work was primarily building infra for inference and basically transitioned to a normal backend role here. Colleagues are nice, work is chill but definitely doesn’t feel like this is where the “action” is happening? I know this is what I signed up for but still digesting

Overall I made the decision to come here because I wanted to transition to my next phase in life focused on cultivating a life outside of work.. still WIP.

Have any of you felt this way?

I figured I’d post this again.

For the past 40 years memory cycles have been predicated on two things:

1. Boom and bust cycles of consumer electronics (laptops, PCs, mobile phones)
2. Memory is fungible — a chip from SK or MU is basically the same thing

Both of those conditions have been violated this time.

The primary demand driver is AI consumption which doesn’t depend on fickle consumer demand. You can see this because the biggest customers of these companies are the hyperscalers building the infrastructure for AI inference. These are the same companies that have locked in LTAs.

HBM is also NOT fungible. It requires a long qualification process and is packaged directly on the GPU die. We’re also seeing early development of process in memory and memory / logic fusion which will reduce the fungibility of memory even more (it’ll start looking more like an ASIC business akin to Broadcom).

The other elegant mechanism at play is HBM consumes significantly more wafer capacity per bit than DRAM. This ensures that memory makers can allocate supply where it’s most profitable. I believe this mechanism is also underrated significantly.

I believe both of these trends will continue to accelerate. Even as supply catches up, it’ll feed even more demand since tokens become cheaper and better utilized.

Now I’m not saying cyclicality is dead. I’m saying the wavelength and the amplitude have changed to resemble the broader semiconductor more closely.

You have to remember memory was the black sheep of the semis business. I believe that is no longer true.

The most credible bear argument is capex slowdown from the hyperscalers. Bears rightly point out the FCF decline and the tapping into capital markets. However, the counter argument to that is I’d argue hyperscalers are making these investments because of CONTRACTED demand backlogs. They literally cannot meet neither internal nor external demand. What Wall Street is complaining about is short term noise to them. The second that revenues start materializing and offsetting capex, Wall Street will roar back into a bullish stance for them as well.

DYOD. NFA.

Moved to Japan a few months ago to work as an SWE but mainly just for the visa sponsorship as I’m FI.

Curious if any of you are also expats who FI here? How do you guys manage the currency conversion headaches?

My local salary is in yen which is fine for daily expenses but if I want to purchase something bigger (bought a watch recently) I had to transfer a significant amount from my US brokerage account to my local bank account which means I’m subject to the spot rate (which recently has been in favor of the USD).

Wondering if there’s a rule of thumb here on how much yen vs USD to keep? Right now 99% of my assets are in the US.

Also which brokerages do you guys use? Schwab and IBKR said I should be good but was curious.

I moved to Japan 6 months ago from the US (basically retired but still work here as an engineer for visa purposes).

My friends here keep asking me why I keep everything in USD. Most of my assets are in US brokerages and bank accounts. I have a Japanese account to get my salary but that’s really it (and just spend it locally).

Especially given how weak the yen is and don’t think that’s changing anytime soon.

I feel like buying any large asset denominated in yen feels risky vs USD denominated. I guess it doesn’t matter if you have zero interest in leaving Japan but yeah.

Hey folks — brutal week post earnings marked by a lot of chop and frankly underperformance. That being said, I think it’s important to provide some color on why we’re seeing the price action we are especially for some of the newer investors here who might be spooked.

1. EOQ / 1H Rebalancing — I believe this is probably the biggest driver of price action. Today marks the first day of the new quarter and the second half of the year. Funds have specific risk management mandates they have to adhere to (eg no single position can be more than 20% of the portfolio). Given how much MU has run up, it’s a fairly standard practice to trim to get back to acceptable allocation thresholds. I’m guessing we’ll see this driver taper out in the next week or so.

2. Post Earnings Options Web — The open interest (volume of unexpired contracts) is genuinely high on MU. A lot of it was created prior to earnings (usually as a hedge on existing positions). Market makers have to be delta neutral, meaning it’s in their interest to buy / sell the underlying stock as needed to maintain a delta neutral stance. Their goal is simply to extract the underlying premium, not to make a directional bet on the price movement of MU itself. You’ll notice strange pinning behavior yesterday, that’s textbook MM hedging flows. The first big tranche of options (~490k contracts) expire tomorrow on the 2nd. Next tranche expires the following Friday.

What’s notable is also this is the same pattern MU exhibited during the prior quarter’s earnings. MU aligns its fiscal quarters pretty closely to calendar quarters so rebalancing is expected.

TLDR — lot of mechanical noise in the market. Likely for the next couple of weeks. Fundamentals haven’t changed (if anything, they’ve gotten stronger). Perhaps a good time to buy.

WHAT AN ABSURD BEAT LETS FUCKING GOOOO

Fingers crossed for a great quarter. May Sanjay guide us to Valhalla.

Crazy to see the value of an individual MUU share now exceeding MU!

Fellas, I’m neck deep in MUU ($1.3m as of this morning) and decided to trim about 10% of my stake just to take a few chips off the table. I’m still 90% in ($1.2m). If anything it was just to scratch my risk tolerance itch given how much of a binary event earnings tend to be.

I’m insanely bullish on MU as I know most of you here are too. That being said understand your own risk tolerance and size your bets appropriately (whether trimming or adding). Don’t go into debt for this and don’t risk your livelihoods.

Best of luck this week. I know it’ll be a banger. LFGGG