41–43 of 43 posts
So, is this the same guy who was shouting homophobic slurs at an instructor while studying at Stanford in the 1990s and who was later accused by a male employee of sexual harrassment at Square and fired?
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On an exit, its not uncommon for founders to have 20-50x the payout compared to the earliest employees. Are you telling me the founders took 20-50x the risk/provided that much more in value?
50X the risk is a tough one, often founders aren't paid, and opportunity cost is just so high today. If a 30-year old engineer is looking to make a jump, a senior IC role at $BIGCO pays $500-750K/yr starting, with significant refreshers each year, cash bonuses and promotion path to even more. The average time to liquidity for a successful startup is 7 years. Assuming the founders take small or negligible salary for t…
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One of the reasons is complexity. Yes, there should be evolution on this front. It's a little lop sided, but not trivially easy to fix either. These instruments are already very complicated.
Not gonna sugarcoat it - this is weak. Companies don’t offer this solution that’s better because it’s “complex”. This is like when engineers say something is going to take a long time because “there’s a lot of moving parts”. The reality, IMO, is that employees do not have a seat at the table when it comes to negotiating ownership shares. And, predictably, they end up with the worst part of the deal.
Every time a company offers something 'non standard' - it's a huge legal expense and risk.
Very few startups can afford such things.
Like complexity in code scales exponentially, so too does potential legal outcomes.
There are a lot of bespoke things each company could do in light of specific situations, but it's just not worth it.