jdmaturen

Who pays when startup employees keep their equity?

JD Maturen, 2016/07/05, San Francisco, CA

As has been much discussed, stock options as used today are not a practical or reliable way of compensating employees of fast growing startups. With an often high strike price, a large tax burden on execution due to AMT, and a 90 day execution window after leaving the company many share options are left unexecuted.

There have been a variety of proposed modifications to how equity is distributed to address these issues for individual employees. However, there hasn't been much discussion of how these modifications will change overall ownership dynamics of startups. In this post we'll dive into the situation as it stands today where there is very near 100% equity loss when employees leave companies pre-exit and then we'll look at what would happen if there were instead a 0% loss rate.

What we'll see is that employees gain nearly 3-fold, while both founders and investors – particularly early investors – get dilute

protocool

/*
  As of version 1.1.2, Propane will load and execute the contents of
  ~Library/Application Support/Propane/unsupported/caveatPatchor.js
  immediately following the execution of its own enhancer.js file.

  You can use this mechanism to add your own customizations to Campfire
  in Propane.

  Below you'll find two customization examples.

madrobby

# before this file is loaded, a locale should be set:
# 
# In a browser environment, you can use:
# ```<script>__locale='en';</script>```
#
# In a server environment (specifically node.js):
# ```global.__locale = 'en';```

# normalize in-app locale string to "en" or "de-AT"
parts = @__locale.split('-')

sstarr

box: wercker/ruby

services:
  - wunki/elasticsearch@0.0.1
  - wercker/postgresql

build:
    steps:
        # Taken from https://gist.github.com/pjvds/6008266
        - script:

kristjan

module AssetsHelper
  def background_images(images)
    content_for :head do
      content_tag(:style, :type => 'text/css') do
        images.map{|selector, path| css_background_image(selector, path)}.
          join("\n")
      end
    end
  end

lleger

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
  "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>Label</key>
	<string>org.redis.redis-server</string>
	<key>Program</key>
	<string>/usr/local/redis/bin/redis-server</string>
	<key>ProgramArguments</key>