Don’t Get Trampled: The Puzzle for “Unicorn” Employees
I&#x27;ve always been baffled that asking these questions are not incredibly obvious to anyone. I could not agree more that not knowing the outstanding shares, the liquidiation preference, etc with the &quot;it&#x27;s like getting paid without knowing the currency.&quot; What&#x27;s interesting, at my first startup job I had the CEO push back when I asked how many outstanding shares there were, amazingly, even though otherwise it makes the stock compensation literally a meaningless number. The second place I work that gave me options gave me a bit more info, but there was still so much uncertainty compared to a company that just paid public RSUs or cash, especially because I had no insight into the financials like burn rate. Both of these places ended up having worthless options, and in both cases I couldn&#x27;t even &quot;wait and see&quot; because by leaving I was forced to choose to exercise.<p>Not only are options often worth less then you think, you get all the tax complications, all the exercise window complications - how do people not discount their value even more?<p>I think a company like Uber should just offer cash. They are not a rocket ship, they are already in space but haven&#x27;t IPOed for weird reasons. They raised enough money to just pay cash. If the financiers want to play financial games, they should play them amongst themselves, not with employees livelihood. All of this advice pops up, &quot;Get an (expensive) lawyer to review it&quot;, &quot;Take this online seminar&quot; etc. It&#x27;s like writing a job offer in a foreign language and suggesting someone take a few Duolingo classes so they can read it and make sure it doesn&#x27;t screw them. And if you need a lawyer to review it, reimbursing an independent one should be part of the job offer, full stop.<p>Nowadays people are saying don&#x27;t join startups for money.<p>But it seems that the founders and VCs are very interested in money. It seems they think _you_ are the only one who shouldn&#x27;t be worried about money. Work yourself to the bone because &quot;we&#x27;re a startup&quot;, don&#x27;t expect to get paid because you&#x27;re &quot;changing the world&quot;, but excuse me while I drive off in my ferrari I bought.<p>Yes, the startup will &quot;change the world&quot;, almost always in the sense that every company changes the world by offering goods and services. But if you want to work for charity, work for a non-profit, why do people think it makes sense to sacrifice their own income so some rich VC can get richer?<p>The tune has changed recently as well. Because pg used to say startups were the way to get rich, by compressing your work years. Zach Holman used to say the same thing. Nowadays you do the compressing your working years in terms of work output, just not in terms of compensation. And Zach Holman is now writing every other blog post on how startups don&#x27;t pay out and they &quot;move fast and break people.&quot;<p>With the crappy salaries startups offer, it&#x27;s almost impossible to buy a house in the Bay Area, yet somehow you get looped into the anti-tech villinization. If I&#x27;m going to be the big bad evil rich bogeyman, might as well actually try to get paid like one.<p>Startups were romanticized. These billion dollar companies that are clearly not startups tried to retain the startup &quot;brand&quot;. And even the early-stage startups are really just product areas of the VC firm. You are still working for a big company. The VCs call the shot, your &quot;CEO&quot; is the PM. But it&#x27;s great for the VCs since they can screw you over, screw the customer over, screw the public over, and it doesn&#x27;t matter because each one of these dinky startups is their own brand you can shut down tomorrow.<p>They rode the waves of a lot of romanticism from pg essays, the Social Network, Airbnb&#x2F;Uber&#x2F;Snapchat, but now bigger companies are paying more, too many engineers have gotten screwed by equity grants, and I think we&#x27;re seeing a general trend away from startups. Maybe it will eventually restart, but VC companies will not be appealing until VCs fix these issues.