FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Piaw Na 408-786-9384, piaw.na@gmail.com An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups now for sale.

Sunnyvale, CA, March 8, 2010. "Most books about startups are for founders and entrepreneurs, and my goal is to offer a different perspective," says Piaw Na, author of An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups. The book is focused instead on pre-IPO engineering employees rather than the entrepreneurs.

An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups covers all aspects of joining a Silicon Valley startup, from selection, interviewing, and negotiating compensation, to tax planning and timely exits from failing startups. "Most people leave it too late to perform tax-planning at a startup," he says. The time to begin tax planning for your stock options is when you join a startup, not the day before the IPO. By the time the IPO has been filed, it is very late in the process, and you may forgo thousands of dollars (if not more!) in potential tax savings as a result.

Furthermore, employees frequently have very little idea of what to look for in stock options contracts, and do not know what the implication of every clause in the contract might mean for them in the event that the startup is successfully acquired.

Spiced up with anecdotes from and about senior managers from successful companies such as Pure Software, Facebook, and Google, the book is filled with case studies, examples, and tools for an employee evaluate his financial position.

Piaw Na was a software engineer at 5 different Silicon Valley startups in 17 years, including 3 IPOs (Pure Software, Mpath Interactive/HearMe, and Google). He graduated from UC Berkeley in 1992 with a degree in Computer Science.