article thumbnail

Startup Stock Options – Why A Good Deal Has Gone Bad

Steve Blank

VC’s have just changed the ~50-year old social contract with startup employees. For most startup employee’s startup stock options are now a bad deal. As Venture Capital emerged as an industry in the mid 1970’s, investors in venture-funded startups began to give stock options to all their employees.

article thumbnail

Why Uber is The Revenge of the Founders

Steve Blank

Hire a CEO to Go Public. The VCs would hire a CEO with a track record who looked and acted like the type of CEO Wall Street bankers expected to see in large companies. The role of the independent member was typically to tell the founding CEO that the VCs were hiring a new CEO.). People had to actually pay you for your product.

Founder 245
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Should You Offer Equity Compensation to Employees?

Up and Running

If you’re thinking about extending equity to an employee or a vendor (as in the example above), you should know that the topic is multi-faceted. If however you are giving a “normal employee” an incentive stock option plan (more on that later), that’s entirely different. Finding great employees first.

Equity 60
article thumbnail

What’s a Fair 409A Discount?

VC Adventure

Most boards did some level of work to determine the FMV of a company’s stock but generally options were priced between 10% and 15% of a company’s then preferred price (because common equity sits behind preferred equity there is typically a discount applied to the FMV of common stock to account for this “overhang”).

article thumbnail

Cash-strapped? How to pay for services with your startup’s equity

The Next Web

From Silicon Valley to Peoria, Illinois, cash-strapped startups look for inventive way to finance their business – often handing out equity to employees, consultants, vendors, and other service providers. However, if you are thinking about compensating non-employees with equity, make sure to consider the following points: 1.

Equity 116
article thumbnail

How to Fund Your Startup Without Losing Control

Up and Running

They allow you to hire more people, purchase new technology, and establish new business connections, among many other benefits. practice in mid-sized or large organizations and act more as employees than owners of the medical practice. Capital investments are like gasoline on a startup business’s metaphorical fire.

article thumbnail

4 Deadly Legal Mistakes That Startups Make

Scott Edward Walker

And please don’t tell us to hire a lawyer.) Indeed, you must make sure that all of the shares of common stock issued by the corporation to the founders are subject to vesting restrictions – which means that ownership of the shares would vest over time (instead of all of the shares being owned outright on day one).

Vesting 89