Even with this, if they're ISOs they'll transfer to NSOs after 90 days. This probably didn't matter before, but the new tax law in the US increases where AMT kicks in from around 120k to 500k.

This means that ISOs can probably be exercised tax free, but NSOs require you to pay taxes on the spread from strike to the fair market valuation.

If your strike price is low enough you may be able to save and afford to exercise the ISOs, the NSOs will probably be too expensive with the tax burden.

There's also a 10yr expiration on options anyway so it's possible that you could lose them even if you're waiting for an IPO while holding unexercised NSOs.

Now it's 500k, the entire concept of ISOs is actually somewhat useful. Exercising a bit each year doesn't have hilarious consequences where the tax cost to exercise is 4 times more than the strike price itself.

In my experience, small startup options don't get exercised because of the tax bill, not because of the strike price.

Yeah it actually makes a difference now.

You still have to watch out for the California AMT (which I didn't know about) - it's 7% and will still trigger at the lower value. As a bonus you can no longer deduct it either past 10k from federal taxes (though that may change with the charity thing).

The ability to do early exercise on unvested shares is also often not an option at startups so when you are able to exercise the spread is higher and the tax penalty is worse.