Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer (2016)

And even if you receive two or more offers at once, many organizations don't bother negotiating. One time I received two offers at once, and neither organization was willing to change anything substantive about their offers.

In this case, one organization had an onerous IP policy and that other did not. I asked for some carve-outs, and the first organization came back with a single line added to the IP policy that did not change anything meaningful. I told them that I could not accept that offer as written and wanted more changes, but they refused further negotiation and told me to take it or leave it. I waited a few days, rejected their offer, and accepted the other offer.

(I think that they were willing to add the single meaningless line to make it appear they were willing to change things without actually changing anything substantive.)

The morale of my story is that you may not be able to negotiate a better offer, but at least you have a choice when you have multiple offers.

Not the OP but I tell everyone on the market that one of the highest ROI things you can do is just go through your own past career history with a fine toothed comb and simply remember all the different things you did and be able to tell the story of each concisely and informatively (if possible, recall actual numbers and quantifiable impacts etc.).

When in an interview, when you're asked a question about your past experiences, the larger the library you have to draw on, the more likely you are to find an example that's relevant and persuasive. Even questions of the form "How would you deal with [hypothetical scenario]", I encourage applicants, if possible, to answer it in the form of "Oh yeah, that's interesting, we had to deal with a very similar case at [one of my previous jobs], here was my approach towards it".

After each interview, do a "l'esprit de l'escalier" retro, write down all the questions asked, what your answer was at the time and what you would have ideally answered now given the fullness of time to think about it. If there's a significant delta, that's a sign to go back and prepare more until your "real time" performance approaches your retroactive performance.

Yeah I rolled my eyes at that, but publishers basically require the front 10% of non-fiction be like that. It's for the people walking through book stores and picking up books to browse.

When negotiating with a startup, especially a founder, always ask for two offers: one with a higher equity offer and another with a higher cash offer.

This allows the other party to still feel in control of the negotiation process but tells you two important pieces of information: the first is what the “top” number is for both equity and cash. The second is how much they really are valuing the equity portion.

Depending on the response, you can argue for both higher cash or equity, or both. I often ask what is preventing from giving both higher cash and higher equity? Often times I’ve gotten both.

For startups, I'm pretty upfront about the fact that I don't negotiate but if they go under my activation price I will simply decline. It's a one and done deal and we can revisit months later. The range of cost I'll accept is quite large (though this part I don't communicate). I don't mind working for $200k annualized on things I really enjoy and I don't mind working on things I enjoy less for $800k annualized and so on. I have an internal sliding scale and I'm quite clear that I don't really need to work on any specific thing. Then I just take the gig if it meets my internal criteria.

In my experience, it isn't about making a $20k more now or whatever. It's about making a million more because you're invested in something worthwhile etc. etc.