Re:Stripe Faces $3.5B Tax Bill as Employees' Shares Expire
by rcme on Thursday March 09, 2023 @11:34AM
(#35083128)
I think Google employees did alright. Let's say you joined in Sep. 2013 (random date). 4 years later, the stock was up 200%. So if you got a $500K grant over 4 years, you'd have 1.5 million. After taxes, that'd be around $1 mm.
Re:Stripe Faces $3.5B Tax Bill as Employees' Shares Expire
by Retric on Thursday March 09, 2023 @11:39AM
(#35083206)
The kind of person you just described likely also got a total of around 1 - 1.5 million in salary across those 4 years.
It’s not like they where handing out stock options like that to secretaries in 2013.
Re:Stripe Faces $3.5B Tax Bill as Employees' Shares Expire
by Retric on Thursday March 09, 2023 @12:00PM
(#35083483)
People getting 500k grants in 2013 from Google were just making a lot of money in general. Remember a grant isn’t an option you’re getting actual stock even the company stayed roughly flat they could have sold the 500k worth of stock.
Grants that size don’t represent a typical employee either. It’s closer to a 2-30% annual bonus that happened to appreciate rather than some life changing payday.
Re:Stripe Faces $3.5B Tax Bill as Employees' Shares Expire
by matthewowen on Thursday March 09, 2023 @11:50AM
(#35083347)
If you take a look at some of the examples in https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/equity-for-software-engin... you see that you really don't have to be at a "first 50 at google" level of success to see 8 digit equity values. Bear in mind that even private companies have some level of liquidity for option holders via secondary sales.
Re:Stripe Faces $3.5B Tax Bill as Employees' Shares Expire
by Retric on Thursday March 09, 2023 @12:08PM
(#35083578)
Highly compensated employees handed grants aren’t startup employees taking risks they are well compensated employees getting deferred compensation. Even if the stock stays flat they still get the face value of the grant.
That said, the double digit examples were “software engineer 2” and “first 10 employees”.
Re:Stripe Faces $3.5B Tax Bill as Employees' Shares Expire
by matthewowen on Friday March 10, 2023 @07:31AM
(#35093562)
Software engineer 2 is a reference to level, not when they were hired (doordash was big by then)
Yes, if you where one of the first 50 employees at Google you probably made low $xxMM, but it’s a long wait until IPO and the overwhelming majority of people at Google didn’t get anything close to that much. Worse the overwhelming majority of companies aren’t Google style success stories.
Also, don’t forget nobody at Stripe has gotten to cash out yet. Your looking for very early employees, at wildly successful startups, who started 10+ years ago, and are still poking around online forms, and willing to talk about it.