
Ask HN: Startup VP Employment Agreements - jmartens
At what stage to startups begin to offer their VP-level leadership with employment agreements that differ from the standard employment agreement? What do VP-level employment agreements typically cover that standard employment agreement doesn&#x27;t?
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davismwfl
Every company is different, and to be fair if you look at corporate America a
lot of mid sized private businesses don't use separate employment agreements
for anything less than a C level exec, and even some of those are just
standard employment.

IMO & experience, but with no hard data to back them up, I'd say this really
isn't something to be concerned with before you have a true need for that
level of leadership and for any smaller company (I can think of exceptions of
course). Lots of startups give people the VP title or Director title, and
there are only like 5 people in the entire company. I understand the reasons
it is done, but at that level they don't require special employment
agreements, they could have them but they aren't required. Overall these types
of employment agreements are usually done for publicly traded or larger
organizations where they need the extra details in writing and those positions
are really a VP of something not of 10 people. Personally, I've been in
companies where there was 1,000 people and over a billion dollars in revenue
and none of the execs had separate employment agreements (which to me was
odd). I've also been at a small startup where a specific engineer (nothing
special) was given a special employment agreement.

As far as what is in them. There is a lot of boiler plate, including moral
turpitude clauses, specific pay agreements, stock options, and any special
disclosure or other arrangements. I've had these a few times, and in general
they are nothing that special but they do lay things out clearly for both
parties, and they are nice to have in a lot of ways because it makes things
very clear and relatively enforceable compared to a standard employment
relationship. You will find terms in these that a lot of times would not be
allowed under traditional employment laws in the U.S., but because the person
is technically a contract employee the rules are slightly different (and can
vary state to state). In my case, all of them had morality clauses, public
disclosure, publicity, association restrictions and very detailed pay, tax &
bonus details.

