1) I really like this, for transparency, clarity, and design.

2) The actual numbers there are a little bit scary. 0.03% equity grant? That's tiny. It's basically worthless.

When did startup equity get so tiny? I'm not singling eShares out here -- just broadly speaking. That means that if eShares exits past a billion dollars, those shares won't even buy a house in the area....

patio11

When did startup equity get so tiny?

Non-technical line employee past Series A. See also the top 25% salary of $64.5k, which is roughly half of what new college grads get offered in engineering at AppAmaGooFaceSoft.

Fundamentally this is driven by one number which is an iron law in the Valley: the employee options pool gets 20% of the company. This is 2000 basis points. It will never, under any circumstances, suddenly have more than 2000 basis points in it. That's 2000 basis points you can issue to every employee from engineer #1 to social media marketing intern #6 in year 8.

What's the average equity allocation going to be when you have 400 employees? Well, it can't be 6 basis points, because 6 * 400 is greater than 2000. Is 400 employees a reasonable amount of a company at IPO? It's actually on the low side, particularly as companies are waiting longer and longer to IPO.

This means that, as companies get de-risked by succeeding investment rounds, equity available to employees drops sharply. Engineer #1 might get 200 basis points out of that pool, for giving up a sleepwalk-to-$300k offer from Google to take a flyer on a company paying $80k which needs to, ahem, build a CRUD app. (Not casting aspersions on any company by calling them CRUD apps. CRUD apps make the world go round.) That's still a low number relative to the amount of risk that engineer is taking and their opportunity cost.

I've heard on the grapevine that the iron law might be relaxed. Investors are pretty in favor of this, as long as the extra basis points come out of founder pockets rather than investor pockets.

x0x0

Don't forget those options aren't just lottery tickets; unless your employer is giving out options with 10-year exercise windows, they're rigged lottery tickets. viz the CTOs on here talking about using them as retention leverage.

You can find a (very small) list maintained by Zach Holman here: https://github.com/holman/extended-exercise-windows

I assume Zach got interested because he discovered after he was fired from github that he was close to losing all the money he "made" on options when github became a unicorn -- he probably had 90 days to exercise a very high priced illiquid security with horrid tax consequences if he fucked up. That's the thing about cash: it's not rigged. If you get cash, it stays in your bank account. Paper gains can disappear.