Stripe Atlas for LLCs

Re:Stripe Atlas for LLCs by tptacek on Monday April 30, 2018 @04:43PM (#16962143)

We paid a lawyer to put together an OE for us at Latacora (we have 10-year vesting). I assumed it would be complicated, but, nope, it works pretty much the way it would in any company: you vest equity over time, and if you leave halfway through your vesting term, you keep half your equity.

The only LLC-specific wrinkle I think we ran into is that we had to spell out that vested equity wasn't equivalent to a pro-rata claim on profits or distributions. But that's like a a sentence or two.

Non-vesting Atlas LLCs are probably super useful for a bunch of different kinds of companies.

But I'll argue that a non-vesting structure is never appropriate for a multi-member startup.

I'm not picking on Atlas; lots of people DIY or even pay lawyers to put this stuff together and get it wrong. We got it wrong at Matasano. It was painful.

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Re:Stripe Atlas for LLCs by toomuchtodo on Monday April 30, 2018 @09:37PM (#16964007)

What was the motivation for 10 year vesting vs the more widely used 1 year cliff/4 year vest out?

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Re:Stripe Atlas for LLCs by tptacek on Monday April 30, 2018 @09:39PM (#16964020)

We're a consulting firm. We looked back at Matasano and thought about how value was added over the life of the firm, and 4 years didn't nearly capture it. If we do product stuff, we'll just spin that out into a separate entity, and that would probably be 4/1.

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Re:Stripe Atlas for LLCs by toomuchtodo on Monday April 30, 2018 @10:09PM (#16964117)

Makes sense. Appreciate the reply.

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