You would have been given an option to purchase an absolute number of shares, not a percentage. Let&#x27;s say 10K. That may have been worth 1% when you were granted them, but as more shares are issued in subsequent funding rounds &#x2F; IPO, your 10K will constitute a smaller percentage of the bigger pie. This is called dilution. You still have 10K shares, though, and they will still be worth $9&#x2F;share at the moment the company IPOs. (And maybe significantly more or less after that moment. Typically employees have a wait a bit after an IPO before they can sell.)<p>They cannot be &quot;destroyed&quot; (under normal circumstances) once you are fully vested, although with certain types of options you may need to exercise (purchase) them if you were to leave the company, if you don&#x27;t want to lose them.<p>The proceeds from your 10K options is easy to calculate once the company goes public: it&#x27;s simply the stock price, minus what you have to pay to exercise the option (the strike price). Perhaps the trickier thing to calculate is taxes because of things like capital gains.