Hi {{First Name|Sheconomist Insider}} 👋 It’s Thamina, Founder of The Sheconomist. This is your bi-weekly dose of celebrating the female economy where I help ambitious, purpose-driven women like yourself flip the script on money, career & wellbeing conventions so you can live life on your own terms.

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Friday night in New York.

I spent it at Google, watching 55 brilliant women pitch what they built with AI in a single day.

Ruth AI and Google ran an AI for Social Good hackathon.

College students and working professionals, strangers in the morning, on stage together by evening.

Nobody told them what to build.

So they built what frustrates them.

An app that helps women avoid being gaslit by healthcare professionals and decrease the time it takes to receive an accurate diagnosis.

A phone scam shield for parents and grandparents to help prevent the $3B in reported fraud losses among adults aged 60+ last year.

A gamified money app for 16 to 21 year old women. Finish a lesson, earn coins, dress your avatar. Your retirement projection grows on the same screen as her outfit.

Safer walking routes at night.

Career & scholarship exposure for first-gen college students.

Duolingo for AI literacy.

A sustainability score for every restaurant in the city.

Functioning tools with live demos after only 6 hours of building. 🤯

And if that wasn’t enough, I also ran into a few friends that evening.

This happens to me constantly here and I never want to get used to it.

I came to New York as an immigrant, knowing almost no one outside of my Duke college bubble.

Almost 5 years later, I walk into a Google office on a Friday night and know people in the room.

That is this city.

Talent, events and culture packed so tightly that you bump into your people on the way to learn something.

And a room full of young women picked this as their Friday night.

Building. Pitching. Learning.

And after, I headed over to Sim Kaur’s housewarming party where I ran into more friends (Hi Meggie! Hi Hannah!).

That is the New York I moved for.

Are you intentionally putting yourself in rooms that expand you and allow you to nurture your network?

🎙️ A candid interview with Shark Tank’s Mark Cuban

💸 How to Monetize the Audience You Already Have

📱 How the tech-based class divide is only going to continue getting worse

💰 I vibecoded this tool that allows you to easily calculate and compare 12 different versions of your financial future so you know how much you need to invest every year to reach your financial goal

Post credits go to voiceoftheadvent,Vera Vlasova, vintagenable, Daniela Demarziani️

Anthropic filed to go public on October 26.

Every headline will give you the same number: a $1.5 to $2 trillion valuation.

I want to give you a different one: $1.30.

That is the strike price on the stock options of an engineer who joined Anthropic two years ago.

It is about to make a few hundred employees veeeeery rich, and it is the clearest explanation of how stock options work you will ever get, because for once the real numbers are public.

A stock option is the right to buy one share at a fixed price, called the strike, no matter what the share is worth later.

At a private company, the strike is set at what the common stock is “worth” on paper, which is usually a fraction of what investors just paid. In 2024, Anthropic’s investors paid $30 a share. Employees hired that year got options with a $13 strike.

Anthropic split its stock 10-for-1 in September, so every number below is post-split. The $13 strike became $1.30: same option, same value, ten times the shares.

The Wall Street Journal reports the IPO is targeting $1.5 to $2 trillion. On the share count in the filing, that is roughly $90 to $120 a share.

The employee who joined two years ago is up about 70x.

The person who joined four years ago 200x to 300x.

The founding team, over 1,000x.

A senior engineer offer from mid-2024 is public on Levels.fyi: $320K base and 59,000 options over four years at a $13 strike. The recruiter called it a $1 million grant.

Post-split, that is 590,000 options at $1.30. At $90 a share, that add up to about $53 million.

Just over half has vested, so call it $30 million today, with a lockup still ahead and a tax bill in between.

Depending on how and when they exercise, 37% to 52% goes to the IRS and the state they live in.

Realistic take-home: $15 to $19 million, from a job they took two years ago.

Fewer than a thousand people worked there back then.

What this actually means for your money:

You will probably never hold a $1.30 strike at a company that lists at $2 trillion.

But the mechanics are identical at every company that pays you in equity, and that is most of your world: RSUs at a public company, or options at a startup.

Three things to do this week:

1) Reread your equity line. Not the dollar figure the recruiter said. The grant itself: number of shares, type (ISO, NSO or RSU), strike if any, vesting schedule.

2) Know your gap. With options, your paper gain is the distance between your strike and the latest 409A or round price. With RSUs, it is the whole share price. Different bets.

3) Know the tax before the liquidity. Half of that engineer’s outcome was decided by an exercise choice most people never knew they were making the week they got the offer.

The people who got veeery rich here had a salary, a manager, and a 401(k).

They owned a slice of something early, and they stayed long enough for it to turn into life-changing wealth.

In abundance,

Please note that I may receive commissions for some but not all my recommendations. I will never recommend something I don’t actually genuinely believe in or haven’t used myself.