Ah, thanks for the clarification. So they became worth $1mm/year, that wasn't the fair market value when they were granted?

I was granted 36,000 shares (or options to buy shares), vesting over 4 years, with a strike price near $4. IIRC, preferred share price was ~$120 in 2015, but I don't recall the precise details. AFAIK there were no refreshers of any kind while I was there.

I think the amount I got was pretty standard for an engineer, but I also know some engineers received 4 or 5 times as much, and others got half that. I think the recruiters had a lot of discretion to decide how much to hand out in order to hire great people.

According to this article the common shares were worth ~$120 in 2019. Preferred will be different from common, but this would mean the investors saw no gains from 2015 to 2019.

Either some info is incorrect somewhere, or there was some split or valuation indeed didn't change much in 4 years.

https://www.vox.com/2019/3/19/18272274/airbnb-valuation-comm...

Gotcha. I appreciate the transparency, I'm always curious about how these early-hire packages work!