Don’t Get Trampled: The Puzzle for “Unicorn” Employees
I agree that people should ask questions, but my advice remains for employees which is to consider shares, or rights to shares, held for a private company to have zero value.<p>If you are going to get enough out of working for a company then great, go for it. Conversely if your <i>only</i> motivation for working for the company is that they have offered you a lot of shares then you should take a step back and think long and hard about that.<p>That flips of course for a publicly traded company, those shares have recognizable value right from the start and you can use Black-Sholes or other future value estimators to get a handle on how much you should be swayed by those shares.<p>As the article points out, it is particular corrosive around the c-suite (CEO, CTO, Cx0 what ever) of people who founded the company. They will often hold a solid number of shares already and even though they shouldn&#x27;t, will often do the math that if they had sold their shares in this round rather than generating new shares they would be multi-millionaires. Sometimes protecting that illusion becomes more important than making good decisions.