Please use correct terminology. You're given options to purchase shares, or you're given shares outright. The former is what most people are accustomed to: options to purchase shares at a discounted price. The latter, know as a "stock grant," does not require the employee to purchase the shares - they've been granted to the employee.
Both of these things tend to come with a vesting schedule: you don't get to buy all your discounted shares when you start working on day 1, nor are granted shares handed to you because you showed up on the first day.
"Granted a year's salary in shares" would mean there's nothing to buy because those shares are yours.
However, this means you take the tax hit when you receive RSUs, unlike options, where you're taxed when you exercise them. This can be good or bad, depending on the value of the shares, the vesting schedule, etc.
http://avc.com/2010/11/employee-equity-restricted-stock-and-...
1. Tax treatment (A RSU counts as income when you receive it, an option counts as income when you exercise it and get stock. Remember, many people recommend early exercising options anyway for preferable tax treatment, though this can lead to taking a loss on taxes if the shares wind up worthless. If you are forced to exercise a large block of options when they are still illiquid, you will have a very large one time tax bill, which may be much harder to deal with than smaller ones each year) 2. Risk (For options, you have to dish out cash from your pocket to actually receive stock, which is more risky than if you don't. Until exercise, the two choices are similar)
In general, I would prefer options with a long exercise period, but I may prefer RSU to options with a short one...
Google, Facebook, Netflix etc. can do this easily since they can just sell the RSU shares on the public market. It's the illiquidity of the shares that makes this option costly for private companies.
The common practice of immediately selling whatever percent of shares is required to pay taxes on them is something that employees are choosing to do, supported by the trading firms that help implement vesting schedules and stock sales. Employees are allowed to keep all of their shares and pay tax on whatever next interval is required instead, if they wish. One can only follow this practice of selling shares immediately to cover tax if the company's shares are liquid, i.e., the company is a publicly-traded company with an IPO.
I suppose in theory one could receive stock in a private company, and sell shares on the secondary market to cover taxes, but with private companies you can't take it for granted that (i) you'll be allowed to do that at all, or that (ii) there will be a buyer for those shares at all, or at a price you're happy with. With a publicly traded company, it is taken for granted that there's always a buyer for the shares, and at a price that is commonly known and accepted.
You _may_ be able to perform an early exercise on ISOs and perform an 83(b) election at the same time. I've done that twice now .. the first time worked out very well. The second time I'd anticipate will work out quite well as well.
Be careful. If your total grant (not the amount your exercising, but the total amount that will vest over four years) is worth more than $100,000, the amount in excess of $100,000 will lose ISO treatment and be treated as NSOs. So if your grant is worth $500,000, and you early-exercise a single share, $400,000 will be automatically converted to NSOs.
This is an IRS rule, independent of your company's terms.
That said, they're not really worth anything to you until they're vested, of course.
Now the remaining 75% of those options might vest monthly over the next three years. "Vesting" does not impart value. It's not indication of whether you're going to make any money at all. Vesting is an instrument used to make sure you stay on with the company for an appropriate amount of time before you're allowed to own part of the company at that discounted rate.
Point: no, you cannot exercise options at grant time, you can only exercise once vested.
Treat is as a lottery ticket. A good friend joined a late startup company in 1999, and in 2000 he was worth 40 million, of which he managed to cash out 10 million before the stock crashed. But that was in the days of IPOs, now the investors prefer to keep the rise in equity to themselves. So you chances of winning the lottery are much less.
That is literally the structure of your comment. You said, don't do it, you mentioned your friend as for why not, and the punchline to his sad story is he only cashed out 25%, or $10 million, of what he thought he had.
By positioning this as your example of a loss, I don't think you could have made a stronger argument for doing it if you had tried. Anyone who has $10M is set for life and independently very wealthy: they're rich. They could fly every two weeks for thirty years, for example (780 trips) staying at a four star hotel every day of that entire time (100 euros * 365 * 30 years still gets to only $1M). I mention these because they're luxuries. He's loaded.
Hence the "it worked for him then, but probably wouldn't work for anyone else, now"
Instead of selling your shares right after the IPO, couldn't you trade options on those shares in a way that closely simulates selling the underlying equity, and stay within the agreement?
On the options - I'm honestly not sure. I don't think it's barred by contract (since that's about managing actually control and share movement), but I don't know what options trading looks like for newly-IPO'd stocks.
If you're 65, a good rate is 4%. This means that if you invest your $10 million in a diversified mix of stocks and bonds, and you withdraw 4% per year, then there's a very good chance that you won't run out of money before you die. See: Trinity Study [1]
If you're younger, you should probably use a more conservative rate of 3.5%. That's still an annual return of $350,000, for the rest of your life.
According to your rate of $110 USD per night, you only need to spend $40,000 per year to live in a four star hotel.
First class flights seem to cost around $3,000. You could fly twice a month for $72,000 per year.
Then you have $238,000 left over for food and entertainment. (And hopefully some charity.)
The issue is that in response to Enron's collapse, Congress implemented The Sarbanes-Oxley Act. This makes IPOing massively more expensive since you have to go through a bureaucratic nightmare first. One established, the costs of continuing may be controlled. But coming into compliance is a headache that people want to avoid.
Not sure high stress and wacky work environments are very productive outside of sales. I'll leave it at that.
You aren't risking hundreds of thousands of dollars, only maybe 10s of thousands.
Instead, I bought a fee thousand dollars worth of shares - only what I could afford. They IPOed at 10x, and I made a down payment on a house.
But that was a rare case: I had some extra savings, the company was clearly succeeding with clear intent to IPO. And even so, I had to wait four years for a payoff.
Now I work from home and I'm much happier.
An investment of mine that yielded 5X exit transaction ended up being 1.3X for those reasons, and I was lucky - if it closed a couple of months earlier, I would end up with 40% loss and a useless tax credit.
Typically you are granted X number of options. You are never told what the outstanding # of shares are and typically the shares themselves are valued in pennies. The idea is you think to yourself "well, it's 10k shares worth about $5k at the current valuation, but if they IPO and it does what google does...I'll be a millionaire!" You never take in to account that the likelihood of you joining a unicorn like google is near 0% and not taking in to account the time frame of such an adventure, the opportunity cost, dilution and other tricks companies play on their employees before IPOs and acquisitions like reverse stock splits.
And the likelihood of a startup valuation increasing 10x in 4 years (typical vesting schedule) after dilution is extremely extremely unlikely to the point that it is time wasted even entertaining the outcome of such a scenario.
That's a false assumption. If they raised $1M seed at a $6M cap, that's 1.4-1.7%. I just pulled up AngelList and there are a number of seed companies offering that along with a decent salary. Taking the $6M to $60M is the risky piece and that's going to be hard, but opportunities to try are definitely available.
> You are never told what the outstanding # of shares are and typically the stock are valued in pennies.
If the CEO is unwilling to tell you when you ask, walk away.
You don't care about relative growth with options, just the difference between strike price and sell price. A '10x' growth of 0.01 to 0.10 only gains you 0.9 per option; a 2x growth of 5 to 10 gives you 5 per option.
Which is also why looking at your grant as '$100k worth' is silly. Look at how many units you have, and how the price might change, not what the strike price is right now.
As in we got zero. Nothing. And this software is still in use in a major product.
So no, please don't trust options or exercised shares at any private company to be worth anything.
You want to get paid? Negotiate salary and laugh in their faces when they offer you options.
Cash is king. Realize you don't understand finance much less finance in an opaque, illiquid company.
Say it 3 times: "Cash. Is. King.".
Max out your 401K and negotiate a company 100% match if you can. Start a private investment account and a savings account and distribute to them every check. Keep doing this. Maximize all this before you become Johnny Wall St. with your illiquid stock options. They're as useful as a penny stock as not as liquid.
Buy some of them if things look bright but classify the investment as your "highly speculative" class of investments and thus ensure they are a small part of your portfolio.
I think what the OP was really trying to avoid was working for 1/2 market rate for years, and then ending up in your scenario.
But if something happens on your way from the bank to the stock sale, guess who still has to pay back all that money.
You need to be pretty savvy to marshal the whole process and understand the contracts, though - it is not turnkey.
But, you're right, some start-ups are explicitly putting in an explicit "consent" clause into the ISO. Which I think is unfair, and kind of BS - certainly if such a clause were valid, that would drastically reduce the value of non-publicly-tradeable shares, and it would be nice if the IRS agreed =)
If you aren't at the company, it will be extremely ordinary for some funding event to dilute you to nothing. And you will have absolutely no say in the matter, because you're an outsider who, and this will be a direct quote, "isn't moving the company forward."
For most of us where startup equity comes with a real valuation of zero (i.e. anything but the Uber or AirBnBs of this world) - I think you're a lot better off ignoring it entirely.
> to walk away from this situation with nothing
This is where I think you are healthier having at least a market rate salary. Then you've not walked away with nothing - you've been a regular employee and happy with your lot and ready to move on.
$100k isn't much money. If you've taken stock in lieu of $15-$20k/yr salary, $100k is pretty easy to make up (especially considering that many bigger, established companies also pay bonuses and have a better structure for vacation and such).
>> anything but the Uber or AirBnBs of this world Personally those are ones I'd be really, really scared of having stock in. They've boxed themselves into a corner: they have precisely one positive exit scenario: IPO. At their current valuations (2x and more of their competition), there's no reasonable path to acquisition. And if they continue to take investor money, those late investors are taking care to protect themselves (whether it's multipliers, last-in/first-out, etc). Employees are absolutely last in line to get the scraps unless things go crazy.
After IPO, there's the lockup period, during which there are earnings results (I believe 2?). If those don't go really well, a downturn in stock price can wipe out employee shares pretty quickly. If I'm an employee of either of those two companies, I'm a little nervous.
I'm not sure I follow. If I agree to be underpaid by $20k a year say then I'm not sure how I'd then on reduced salary save up $100k after tax and to the extent I wouldn't "miss it" in exercising the options. If a company is paying bonuses etc I'd rather get the market rate salary to begin with and ignore the stock. I may be heavily misunderstanding your first sentence though :)
The lockup period post IPO is an excellent point - and probably further fuels my cynicism around low percentage stock options as anything but a gamble.
The shares are worth at most 8k in salary, that is if they're somewhat liquid. (which they are definitely not for startup and far away IPO).
If you took a $20k drop in salary for that, you've been not only screwing yourself at this job but also for ALL your future jobs, because future companies will try to downplay you based on your current salary.
If they ask who made that restriction, link to this post.
The uncertainty around the current valuation (which everyone has due to the infrequency of material events), the uncertainty around the likelihood of a major liquidity event, its size, and its type make ISOs incredibly hard to accurately price. If anyone says they can do it accurately, they're lying.
The golden cuffs _will_ click if you stick around any time at all and have even slightly bad luck: Maybe you burn out before vesting, or the company blows an acquisition that would've fit your schedule and your payout/life goals.
Waiting around after you hear the click becomes a losing game. Find another one to play, it's a big world.
It comes down to a gamble. With your numbers, a big one.
But until that choice is forced on you, I say wait. There's no reason for an early exercise. Even with slight tax advantages I'd rather call that the cost of minimizing my risk.
But why shouldn't I just come to the table with $10k and taxes, exercise those shares, then use the profits to buy up the remaining shares?
The US used to have a steady IPO market but that has dried up in recent years. I have read that 2017 might brighten things a bit, but we'll see.
The biggest problem is SOX: going from a private company to public (something I've done twice, now) is a pain, and can take a year to implement all the regulations (you may even need to change source code, and also commit processes). It's even worse on the accounting/business side. More importantly perhaps, it's expensive: you don't want to take your company public unless you can afford the hit to productivity and cash flow.
According to the WSJ, that's why there aren't more IPOs these days.
A security nightmare, but time and time again we've seen you don't need good security to make a lot of money.
Let's say you're granted about a year's salary in shares when you first join so you've vested $100K for a round number. When you leave that equity is worth $1 million. Now, you have to come to the table with the $100K to exercise and probably another $200K to pay the tax man. If the company goes belly up, you lose $100K outright and are stuck with a $200K tax credit that you get back in $3K per year deductions for the rest of your life.
Or, you could have exercised the shares as you vested and paid a bit less in tax with the lower 409A valuation..but you're still maybe looking at a $100K total tax bill.
Do you take the risk or not? Or do you end up locked in for a few more years of handcuffs while waiting it out?
It'd be really hard for me at least to walk away from this situation with nothing..so then I have to value the equity as something. And if I want to treat it as 0 it'd be really tempting to wait a few years and see..which again means the equity is worth something to me.