What is the reason why they were diluted in your case? Was it "nefarious" (e.g. targeted specifically at you) or just a consequence of unfortunate circumstances (e.g. heavy downturn, aggressive liquidation preferences, ...)?
The company ran out of latest round of funds without increasing its value, and took them best deal it can. In the years since it had diluted around that much, again.
How is it possible to "dilute employees" from a technical point of view? Most of the times, even early employees, VPs and founders have common stocks, so how can one legally dilute just some employees without screwing the other common holders? Genuinely curious.
It would be nice to know how good this liquidity deal is for early/late employees, after taking into account all dilutions, liquidation preferences and "misc royalties" of preferred shares holders.
Could bring some hope (or one more slap in the face) for us easily screwable early startup employees.
As a further data point, some people in my personal network of comparable experience and age are pulling 500-700k a year from Google/fb. That of course includes RSUs, but that's literally the total compensation they are able to translate into hard cash every single year.
Now I don't believe you :) 6 years of experience pulling $500k at google/fb? I've worked for these kind of companies, there is no such things. Unless you're one of these isolated rats who don't communicate to anyone. There are some at google but not a lot..
- age: 34 base: ~250k, RSU package: 3M, same terms
Both are very solid individual contributors, smartest guys in my personal network for sure.
It's really not hard to believe. Another acquaintance of mine works at a very big Hadoop startup here in the bay (guess name) as a product manager, and her total compensation is around 350k a year. It's not surprising to have a very solid engineer get some multiple of that.
Poor formatting (editing from mobile). $150k is base salary. $1.8M is the additional RSU grant with 4 year vesting schedule heavily negotiated prior to joining (in these examples, with a bidding war between google, fb and another very big company).
Also, I can personally testify how important negotiating the offer is. I routinely (every ~2y) interview to discover my market value and, from a position of power (e.g. "Well I'm happily employed at the moment so the incentive has to be good" or "I have a higher offer"), is very easy to negotiate additional stocks. I've been able to improve the offer by a good $100k yearly RSUs (!!) just by negotiating with HR. It also helps that I kind of like the process (I'm that weird person who gets thrilled by buying a new car and making a car salesman lose his patience by constantly asking a better offer and absolutely be ready to leave if it doesn't happen)
Would be great if you could impart some offer negotiation advise! I was once interviewing with the fruit company. The HR guy was very aggressive, and insisted that I reveal all details of my current comp before we proceed further. This was after I was referred by an employee and already had an conversation with the team lead. After I revealed my comp, he acted very surprised about how high it was, and about how difficult it would be for them to exceed it.
How do you respond when they insist on knowing your comp details?
As fuzzy-logic said, just don't reveal your total comp, and be willing to walk away from it for real (walking away from such juicy offers requires the most determination, so it's important you do it from a position of power, for example if you already have a good job, otherwise they have you by the balls).
The only case where it can be beneficial to disclose something about your compensation is if you have deferred compensation (e.g. stock options) that you want your potential new employer to somehow consider in the offer. In that case, sharing a copy of the grant is the easiest thing to do, and doesn't hurt much
I see. How does one then approach the topic of compensation, and determine if the two parties at at least in the same ballpark?
Do you postpone comp-talk until an offer is on the table? Or is it safe to assume that large companies generally have an extremely elastic range?
Do you think it's a good idea say something like "If you can offer $OBVIOUSLY_EXTREMELY_HIGH, i will immediately accept. For lesser offers, i will evaluate them on a case by case basis."
The author was a founder of a very little startup (3-men shop) and after 6 months tried to approach Facebook to be acquired, and Facebook told him: we don't want your technology, but since you have proven to be capable of building something exceptional, we want you to join (and you can throw away your product), and we'll offer you $2-3M (don't recall the exact number) in RSUs with a 4y vesting schedule, which he clearly accepted.
Now, those "acqui-hires" happen all the time among those big companies. Since the acquiring company is clearly not interested in the product but just in the talent, how is that different than getting in the door as a really solid individual contributor with terrific experience in getting stuff done (of course, your resume and interview skills need to reflect that, and also, probably even more importantly, your negotiation skills). You can choose to not believe me, but the answer is that there is no difference at all.
If you live in the valley, I can't believe you don't have an acquaintance who followed exactly the path of being individually "acqui-hired" as a talented individual contributor (but not being part of a real acquisition, mind you), which is exactly what happened to my two friends described above (no direct reports, purely technical gig). They are very very good in their fields and managed to sell themselves very well to the right teams inside those big companies.
Now that all make sense... The acqui-hire situation is another topic. Millions of dollars are spent when it comes to people acquisition. And indeed, companies are usually willing to get what they need no matter what. Any random software engineer with 10 years of exp can't get that in the valley by applying at Google. That would cost Google a lot of money... Plus, there's no real negotiation when you sent out your Resume asking them to hire you... they have full control. You might get a 10k sign-on bonus just by asking. That's it
