#238 – From Adversity to Ambition with Niya Dragova of Candor

What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from ndhackers.com, and you're listening to the n d hackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these n d hackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same. I'm here with Nia Dragova, the founder of Candor. Nia, how's it going? Hey. It's going well. Very nice to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me. Yeah. Long time fan. Yeah. And vice versa. I think my buddy Julian introduced us maybe, like, ten or eleven months ago, earlier this year. Yeah. We were talking about your company and building community. I don't know how helpful I was doing that call. I brought out Very. Actual good tips. Very. But, it's cool to actually have you on the podcast. Why don't we tell listeners, like, what Candor is? Because it's kinda changed since I talked to you, almost a year ago. So at Candor, we help tech employees at public companies manage their equity. And what we do is, essentially give you information, advice, and resources to really understand what all of your options are. Very few people realize that how we treat equity hasn't really changed much since the eighties and the seventies. But how many people we pay in equity, well, that's really changed. Almost everybody gets it now. So we're here to sort of close the gap and make those tools available to everyone and not just to kind of the select few. Historically, that's been executives, but, hopefully, in the future, it'll be everyone. Yeah. Yeah. It's super cool because you guys do a lot of stuff. I mean, like, their main thing is basically my favorite business, help people make more money. Help employees make more from their equity. Like, who doesn't wanna make more money? Yeah. But then if you go to your website, so it's candor.co, candor.co, and you go into resources, you have all these other things. So we are just talking about your newsletter, which we'll get into. I love your newsletter. I think it's my favorite newsletter in tech. Then you've got, like, a salary negotiation guide. You have offer reviews. You have all sorts of different things. Like, you can go there and, like, literally say, like, oh, you know, I applied for a job at Facebook. Like, is this a competitive offer that they gave me? What kind of other offers are people giving me, etcetera? So I've used this. Others have used it. It's super useful. But your main thing is helping employees make more money from their RSUs. Yep. I think there there's such a big juxtaposition between people who traditionally have been part of tech and people who just now are getting the door open to be part of tech, and Candor really …