It's very common for young people to not understand financial matters like options grants. That doesn't mean it's okay to benefit from their ignorance, especially as the company is now making a large number of people very wealthy.
IMO it's a matter of doing the decent thing over the legal thing. Certainly if I was making a zillion bucks like the boss of WeWork I would find a way to pay the early employees who missed out.
I think it's common for young people to not understand: your employer is not on your side.
You are making a legal contract which your employer is trying to extract a maximum amount of profit from, while passing on risk, and has more experience and understanding of how to negotiate to that effect.
Maybe that's true for most venture-funding backed startups, but it's a bit of an unfair generalisation. There are plenty of employers out there that don't want to suck their employees dry. Some companies have a more long term vision, and the easiest way to retain employees for more than a few years is to not exploit them.
I agree that it's a somewhat unfair generalization that paints a harsh picture. The core point of the argument still holds though, I think. A cynical response might be to say that the difference is the employer is accounting for longer-term replacement hiring/training costs, rather than short term value extraction. The optimization has new parameters but the structure of the relationship is still fundamentally transactional. I don't really think that's how things generally run, though.
Both parties should want a place that's enjoyable to work over the long term, yet sometimes the company will have to make hard decisions. Priorities slip or people are straight-up unable to avoid, say, laying off half the staff. Framing and context matter, as always. "Your employer is not on your side" is hopefully not a statement about the day-to-day interactions with your boss, or even a statement about company values, but it can serve as a reminder that there's always a line somewhere, and, intent aside, your best interests may simply fall on the wrong side.
> a bit of an unfair generalisation... There are plenty of employers out there that don't want to suck their employees dry.
I think I generalised it correctly. I agree with this point - that it's often not the most profitable to suck your employees dry, as you say.
Your employer is not on your side, even if your goals temporarily align with their long term vision. That is almost the best you can hope for in employment.
If business has a time of crisis, for whatever reason, then it becomes a risk-minimising strategy to exploit staff - at least until the crisis is over or the business collapses.
Yes. Under capitalism, you will never see the full fruits of your labour, it goes first and foremost to the company and they will give you (theoretically) the smallest slice of it they can get away with. Of course, sometimes there are “nice” employers but they have the same interests.
There's nothing requiring that to be true. There are whole ranges of socialist ideologies based on removing the state, and so reducing or removing hierarchies, including pulverising large employers into smaller units.
There are others (with significant overlap) based around retaining market mechanisms, but externalising labour conditions and salary, and so using market mechanisms as a resource allocation mechanism. A market is only a threat to workers if there is a significant negative impact from being made redundant - some socialists believe society should strive for a system where we encourage businesses to make people redundant by making themselves more efficient; redundancy protections are a band aid for a lacking welfare system.
It's not for nothing that Marx and Proudhon violently agreed that one of the most radical policies you can pass is providing cheap credit (though they disagreed about agreeing...) - make credit cheap and you make exploitation of labour far harder because it becomes easier and lower risk to leave to work for yourself.
Sure, state socialist ideas ideologies would have the issue you describe, which is one of many reasons why a whole lot of socialists find them more objectionable than capitalism.
> That doesn't mean it's okay to benefit from their ignorance
Seems to me that a startup offering real pay is not taking advantage of anyone.
The shady way of doing things is to say "Hey, I'll offer you these options instead of real pay, and they will be worth X in a few years time". Then during work: "Hey, can you work a bit more, it's your money on the line too". That is how you take advantage of people.
You cannot be angry not winning the lottery when you didn't pay for the ticket.
> It's very common for young people to not understand financial matters like options grants. That doesn't mean it's okay to benefit from their ignorance, especially as the company is now making a large number of people very wealthy.
You have it backwards. If the person doesn't understand financial matters like options, a company could exploit that by offering them these complicated products in lieu of cash.
> It's very common for young people to not understand financial matters like options grants
Do you have any recommendations for learning more about that?
I recently started working full-time at a tech company and I feel like I also have too little understanding of those things.
I didn't come to it easily myself, and I would have thought my degree would have taught me something, but somehow they gloss over a lot of things in business school.
These days there's a lot more online that you can google. Here's the rough areas of coverage I'd go for:
- Corporate fundamentals. What is limited liability? How do I make a co in my country? What are the different types of co available? (GmbH vs AG, LLP vs Ltd, C-Corp vs S-Corp, Charities?)
- What are the financial and taxation setups? Basically, how are entities related to each other? Can I borrow money from my co? How are dividends treated. This is a thing you want an accountant to tell you, because they know the praxis, not just the headline rules of your jurisdiction.
- Finance. What does capital structure mean? What's the difference between equity and debt? What's the difference between your mortgage and your credit card? What are options and warrants? (I spent years trading vol, still there are differences between listed options and employee ones, esp wrt tax). What do junior and senior mean? What are preferred shares, and what are convertible bonds? Since we're talking here, HN people have written a load of articles about SAFE notes and similar. They are quite good about also explaining what your interest is in these situations, because it's often not obvious to a newbie.
Interesting article from a couple of days ago was about Toptal. Those kinds of articles should be read.
I started getting a “wrong pay” by a shark in Luxembourg, I was unhappy. But then, if you asked compensation for now knowing how to negociate this contract, how do you know how to negociate a contract for nuclear weapons or for the biggest commitment of your company?
You don’t. You never do. The only correct way is to repeat. And thus, if you sell billion dollar contracts, go lower and do it more often, never go for the biggest ever. Or at least, progress step by step, so you know most of the major tricks. But if a major contract is your biggest ever by a multiple, then you’ll always br cheated on tricks you don’t know yet. And on smaller contracts you’ll cheat the weaker person. Don’t abuse it, but it’s part of the contract theory.
Venture Deals (by Brad Feld) provides a great overview of startup finance matters. It is intended for founders and covers things other than employee equity. It’s an extremely useful read because it provides a holistic overview of the overall fundraising process and enables one to think about equity in a systematic way.
The new book Secrets of Sand Hill Road by Scott Kupor is slightly newer, a little more readable, and talks a lot about dilution, but otherwise covers almost the same ground.
Both books are great in understanding the space and motivations of various players.
That’s another great one! I would suggest reading the Venture Deals (which appeared quite practical to me) first and following it up with the Secrets (that’s great for understanding incentive structures and motivations of everyone involved).
> It's very common for young people to not understand financial matters like options grants. That doesn't mean it's okay to benefit from their ignorance,
Is that one reason for a sketchy company to prefer to hire new grads?
IMO it's a matter of doing the decent thing over the legal thing. Certainly if I was making a zillion bucks like the boss of WeWork I would find a way to pay the early employees who missed out.