Founder Hiring Option Pool Valuation 
Both Sides of the Table
JULY 22, 2010
Other founders, “as a privately held company we don’t disclose our valuation.&# Me, “dude, I’m not a journalist. I just want to figure out what a fair valuation is.&# I figured all the VC’s talked so we should. No option pool shuffle. Investors own 25%, the founders own 75%.
SoCal CTO
SEPTEMBER 27, 2011
Founders vs. Early Employees To help with this discussion, let me start with a definition of "early employee." The first few people into a startup are on a spectrum of founder vs. early employee. Founders are likely not paid for a long time and have a sizeable equity percentage for early risk and having the concept.
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Rob Go
JUNE 17, 2014
In my last post about raising seed vs. jumping straight to A, I received a good comment from Chris Woods that my analysis neglected to include the impact of option pools that are created at each financing round. There have been others in the past that have detailed the math behind option pools and their impact on venture deals.
Hunter Walker
AUGUST 7, 2017
But employee option pool is important enough that I wanted to briefly expand upon my comment above. While you should expect these sorts of hires to take below market cash comp versus what Google is paying them, this tradeoff needs to be replaced with equity upside.
Both Sides of the Table
JUNE 5, 2015
In the old days VCs funded off of a “pre-money” valuation. If you add the pre-money valuation (let’s say $8 million) to the amount of money you’re raising (let’s say $2 million) you get the post-money valuation. How much is in the option pool? Why do investors care about this?
Austin Startup
JANUARY 25, 2020
This was my time at a Wall Street firm that had hired me after I applied for their Junior Stockbroker position, a little while after I graduated from college. Other founders say having a baby beats it, but we’ll have to wait and see about that. Those could help out a lot of founders. I heard them but said nothing.
www.paulgraham.com
OCTOBER 23, 2010
Whichis good news for founders: theyll get to keep more of the company. Youdnegotiate a round size and valuation with the lead, whod supplysome but not all of the money. Standardized paperwork will do away with the need tonegotiate anything except the valuation, and that will get easiertoo. In the old days, the standard m.o.
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