

20% of Vested Options Are Left On The Table - dpmorel
https://medium.com/p/5aa1f8854c95

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twic
_During my interview process I was told 3 different times by the CEO that
there was a vehicle setup for employees to sell shares back to the investors
of the company (namely usv and spark). It turns out that this was a complete
sham and sales job. I’m not the only person who’s been told this during
interviews (the person who replaced me as head of tech was similarly surprised
to find out it doesn’t exist)._

That's really bad. Perhaps Dan should have done a bit more homework on this
alleged vehicle, rather than taking the CEO's statements at face value.
Perhaps he should even have got something in writing. But it's undeniably
dishonest of the CEO to have said this when it wasn't true.

 _But really, these are the employees who helped build your business, and
ripping them off of earned options to the tune of 20% is shit._

But that's the deal. Options are there to entice people to join a company, and
to stay there. Once someone has decided to leave, the options have failed in
their purpose. Why would the company give away money once that has happened?
If it was part of the deal that they would, then sure, they should. But it
isn't part of the deal.

 _This isn’t an “employees need to learn more about options” problem._

Yeah, it is.

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dpmorel
re: why would the company give away money once that has happened?

"Post-employment relationship mgmt". There are huge rewards to keeping good
relationships and huge costs to not (e.g. referring potential engineers
looking for work, word of mouth referrals on working there, etc).

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twic
Surely honouring your commitments, and not being a jerk, is all it takes to
keep a good relationship? Not going above and beyond what you agreed on to
transfer money from your company to your ex-employees?

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dpmorel
its why time extensions are typically the best practice... esp for those who
have a "large" exercise

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twic
From the linked Fred Wilson article:

 _Let’s say that you want to hire a top software engineer and are competing
with equity grant offers from Facebook and Google where the value of the grant
is $1mm._

Do Facebook and Google really offer engineers a million dollars worth of
stock? For what level of engineer? Vesting over what period? Do other big tech
companies offer similar amounts?

As a London-resident developer (who doesn't work for a hedge fund), i'm used
to salaries here being considerably lower than in Silicon Valley, but if that
number is on the mark, the difference in stock options is even bigger.

~~~
dpmorel
Friend of mine got about $900k in RSUs over 4 years from Twitter about 1 year
pre IPO. Obviously the $ number is dependent on share price, may be down to
$600k now. He was an engineering team lead, ex-Google and ex-MS.

~~~
twic
Thanks. I was offered a position as a senior developer with a big Valley tech
firm here in London, and it included 60 kGBP of RSUs over four years. Senior
is not team lead, but that does seem like quite a difference.

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DoucheDanMorel
Dan is a total fucking moron - impulsive, know it all that is nothing more
than a two bit dev ops back office it guy. Get a life dan....as you said you
cant even exercise some options at this point - no surprise that you haven't
had a success. Victim, no one owes you anything. Be thankful that you even
conversed with fred cause thats the closest you will be to success.

your the worst example of a self serving tech guy with expectation of
entitlement. Thanks for tanking peek after blowing 32 mill in capital...

retard retard retard

~~~
dpmorel
the great jeff leventhal everybody...

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Myand1219
Not sure if your complaining or explaining... exercise your options you left
role, what else are you expecting....be happy ceo was clear with you many are
not, especially where i live

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icedchai
just 20%? sounds like a lot of people are throwing their money away.

