181–190 of 235 posts
It will be very interesting to see what happens when all these antitrust cases against Google, Apple and the likes are over. If the verdict will be that developers can use any payment processor, Stripe is in for a huge market.
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Frankly, I'd be fucking pissed off about this if I had options.
If the other posts are to be believed they don’t have options, they have RSU’s. Not the same thing. Still not great of course but it’s better in the long run if leadership levels with people.
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RSUs are great at public companies, as soon as they vest they turn into regular shares. At a private company, well, it seems pretty hard to sell any shares in those isn't it?
> private company, well, it seems pretty hard to sell any shares in those isn't it? It’s a multibillion dollar market that all the banks are active in.
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Frankly, I'd be fucking pissed off about this if I had options.
I'm genuinely curious why you say this. Could you please elaborate? I've only worked at publicly traded companies. I don't understand how this wouldn't be the exact situation you'd want to be in. my understanding is this: 1. If you're granted options at price X, and the new share price is lower than X, you're under no obligation to exercise your options. So no real financial loss or cost to you. 2. If you're granted…
> 2. If you're granted options at price X, and the new share price is higher than X, you're still under no obligation to exercise your options. So it's up to you now.
The payout on a call option is min(exercise - strike, 0). If you are granted options and X and the new share price is lower than X your options are now worth 0[1]. If the price is higher than X, you have lost some function of the volatility, time to expiry and Price_new - Price_old.
In both cases there is a real mark to market financial loss to you even if you haven't yet crystallized that loss by exercising (which of course you would never exercise if the value was zero).
[1] Actually very close to but not exactly zero because of the vol and the time to expiry. They could get above water again.
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I think that's a more complicated explanation than necessary. If their private valuation is higher than their public valuation it means they can raise money more cheaply while private.
To the benefit of the company and the people that control Stripe, not necessarily the hard working ICs that would enjoy liquidity. The opportunity cost of this restriction on their lives is huge. Had they gone public two years ago, employees would have benefitted from a market of a lifetime, with equity in one of the best tickets in town. A lot of life changing early retirements and "Fat FIRE".
What restriction, exactly?
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most of the startups that offered me stock options had completely exaggerated valuations, so... my heart goes to engineers, who joined a startup on bold promises to make it, but never got to IPO, M&A or even worse - were forced to execute options to later sell them at loss
So many startups never IPO, and their stock options are effectively $0. When they leave they have a small window to exercise them and pay capital gains tax (with inflate valuation, this could be $100k or more). Anyone thinking of making money off stock options at pre-IPO startup are taking a get a) valuations are realistic b) startup will IPO. In this current environment, both are false.
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> private company, well, it seems pretty hard to sell any shares in those isn't it? It’s a multibillion dollar market that all the banks are active in.
It's still extremely expensive, slow and challenging to sell pre-IPO shares even in a major stock that has a lot of active liquidity.
Sure. But "expensive, slow and challenging" liquidity beats no liquidity at all. Which is why few investors would agree to the lock-up terms of an RSU. (These terms make sense at companies which aren't going concerns, because they're young or going bust. They also make sense for executives at all stages. They don't make any sense for a multibillion dollar enterprise.)
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They should still be angry because this company should’ve gone public and made them liquid a year ago.
Shouldn't going public on an unrealistic market cap would cause more issues than benefits? Sure, a healthy exit is ok but later pressure to recover the market cap in the short term can cause heavy structural damages inside any org.
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This is why many Stripes on blind are not angry. They will get more shares next year.
They should still be angry because this company should’ve gone public and made them liquid a year ago.