
Founder Vesting Schedule Advice - stefan3iii
Imagine three senior engineer founders are creating a startup consulting business. The goal is to initially land small contracts, but ultimately to grow the business into a much bigger firm with many employees and maybe eventually be acquired after 6 years.<p>The standard stock vesting period is a 4 year vest, possibly with a 1 year cliff.<p>Now what are the advantages and disadvantages of longer vesting schemes (just for the founders): How about vesting periods, say 5, 6, 8?, 10???! years.<p>Longer vesting periods provide more reward for founders that stay longer. Is that more fair?<p>Would investors find a long vesting period attractive if they were considering this business for acquisition?<p>With longer periods there is a greater chance of large amounts of unvested stock upon acquisition. How should the founders ensure they are properly rewarded in this case? Should they have put in some partial single trigger acceleration at founding? Or should some sort of acceleration be negotiated as part of the acquisition?<p>Other thoughts?
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tlb
Longer than 4 years is probably better. I recommend the advice at
[https://blog.samaltman.com/employee-
equity](https://blog.samaltman.com/employee-equity)

