> Rule of thumb for non profitable tech companies.... If you are a company that isn't making a profit and you continually preach look at the users, look at the users. and then fail to even hit your target on that, you're going to get punished.....heavily.
Employees get granted shares at any price, with the number of shares adjusted for the current price. Shares acquired before IPO can be sold for cash in 6-9 months. Shares in ongoing RSU packages can get sold in similar intervals but the main waiting game is for them to vest at all. Look at the dilution quarterly in the 10Qs, and look at the Form 3 and Form 4.
Your rule of thumb is missing the point.
Non profitable tech companies simply have to dangle a metrics carrot in front of investors as long as possible so they can keep dumping shares on investors as long as possible.
This is what Twitter is doing, Zynga, King, Snapchat (and Facebook, Google, etc. these have stronger fundamentals though). It doesn't matter if the shares are $20 or $2, the employees get granted the same monetary value of shares in each RSU package and they sell them over time.
Think of it like Dollar Cost Averaging for Dollars.
The capital markets are heavily tilted in favor of the issuer, so you have to re-align the purpose of the metrics with that in mind. "Who is benefiting from this", the issuer.
Only the executives get an EVEN BETTER parachute, if the company actually meets key metrics, but thats the only economic alignment we have and it comes from the board.
Many other times, the company and employees borrow against their shares, and get margin called when the share price goes too low too fast. This circumstance is basically the only thing that has a material affect on these companies (aside from just running out of cash altogether)