20% of Vested Options Are Left On The Table

by dpmorel • 12 years ago

7 11 12 years ago

icedchai• 12 years ago

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

twic4• 12 years ago

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.

dpmorel4• 12 years ago

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).

twic4• 12 years ago

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?

twic4• 12 years ago

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.

dpmorel4• 12 years ago

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.

twic4• 12 years ago

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.

Myand1219• 12 years ago

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

DoucheDanMorel• 12 years ago

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

dpmorel4• 12 years ago

the great jeff leventhal everybody...

20% of Vested Options Are Left On The Table

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