&gt; If you have 5% of a company locked up by people who no longer work there, you have to find a way to reward current employees<p>We need to get past this line of thinking. Why do companies not say the same thing for the salaries they&#x27;ve paid former employees? &quot;Boy, I wish we could get back the $30,000 we paid Bob between July 2011 and October 2011.&quot;<p>We don&#x27;t say that because the employee <i>earned</i> that and once they&#x27;ve earned it, it&#x27;s out of your account and into theirs. Stock, though a different mechanism, needs to be thought of the same way. If someone has worked there long enough to vest that stock, <i>they should have the option available to own that stock</i>. Just because they made the company successful enough to not be able to afford to exercise their options in time doesn&#x27;t mean we should take that possibility away from them.<p>Whether or not it was intended years ago when it became a norm, the 90 day exercise window, at this point, is a surrogate mechanism for companies to steal compensation from employees after the fact. That&#x27;s horrible.