HashiCorp IPO today

If an employee joins with ISOs based on a $40 share price, and the market price is $35 or $15 a quarter or two later, it is bad for morale. A bump, even a small one, means everyone is “in the black”, which is good for morale.

Once employees are transitioned to RSUs, it’s less of a concern, because they’re still making money, just less money. It’s a big concern for ISOs granted close to an IPO, though.

This is why some companies switch to RSUs within a year or so of an expected IPO date.

We had an all-night hackathon the night before (one of the hacks was to wire into the "Nasdaq bell" button to post an opengraph story) and the whole company was mostly in a "stay focused and keep shipping" mode.

The leadership team shared a few funny jokes each week at the all-hands events leading up to it talking about the roadshow but prep work for the IPO was mostly framed as "this thing we've got to do" and not as some kind of goal. The company was overwhelming focused on the work at hand.

Overall the IPO was cool and I'm sure for many momentus, but as a somewhat newly acquired employee it was mostly a non-event and no one made me feel like I'd missed out by not joining earlier. Everyone was really just starting to feel comfortable at the newish physical HQ and morale was generally high. Most if not all the internal chatter was around the idea that "this journey is 1% finished" and at least everyone I knew there was in "let's do this and move on" mode.

Mark had publicly committed to not selling any shares for at least a year so no one thought he was going to bail or anything.

The stock price then proceeded to fall from $30's to the $10's and despite the on-paper financial hit for many of us it was kind of validating that "those silly people in wallstreet still don't get it" and that we weren't at the end of anything, we were still at the beginning.

As FB then consistently grew for the next 9 years to nearly $400/share there was still plenty of upside so there wasn't much of a pre-IPO vs. post-IPO tribal thing going on either.

In short, the culture was never built around "let's get this thing to IPO" so it wasn't really impacted negatively by reaching that milestone.

So with a large bump (like 100% on Snowflake for example), you defer a lot of tax to the future. And if you hold out 1 year until selling, you change a lot of that gain from income into long term capital gains (which has a lower tax rate)