When a Unicorn Startup Stumbles, Its Employees Get Hurt
Very glad the NYTimes ran this piece. The only part they underplayed is they made it sound like the startup &quot;stumbled.&quot; No, it sounds like it went exactly as planned. Blackberry got the acquisitions, investors got their money, execs got their bonuses, and the rank-and-file got nothing. That isn&#x27;t stumbling, that&#x27;s the playbook.<p>Tech employees need to wake up about common vs preferred shares, and that the former are worthless. They are NOT worthless because they are &quot;lottery tickets&quot; and most startups fail. They are worthless because they are designed, as a financial instrument, to be fake equity with no real protection from dilution and liquidation preference.<p>The most insulting aspect of common shares is that engineers get talked into pay cuts on the premise that they get these options, essentially being asked to invest a portion of their potential compensation into the company, but are then told they don&#x27;t deserve to be given real equity because they aren&#x27;t &quot;real&quot; investors.<p>I understand that from a founder&#x27;s perspective, asking someone to give you millions of dollars is significantly more challenging than asking someone to take a 30% pay cut, so it&#x27;s easy to give strong preference to the former. But, supposedly and debatably, it&#x27;s also difficult to recruit talent, and it&#x27;s going to be significantly more difficult as employees increasingly realize that Common ISO&#x27;s aren&#x27;t &quot;lottery tickets&quot; they are &quot;toilet paper&quot;. So either startups are going to have to re-invent these equity packages, or the talent will flock away from the VC companies and towards companies that can pay salary. Of course, the VCs have a huge playbook to flood the market with more talent to (taking $100 mil taxpayer money to fund the same bootcamps they invest in to work for the same companies they hire via Obama&#x27;s tech talent shortage program, for example), so who knows.