Real MSFT stock beats a theoretical could-have-been with a 10x upside.
As someone who has done startups, I highly agree with this statement.
But for a lot of people doing start ups for the first time (including my younger self) they don't understand the headache of private market equity, and thus do not apply the correct discount.
As they say, a bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush.
Nadella was directly involved and he's way smarter than that. Comping one the best ML teams in the world correctly is child's play compared to undoing Balmer's open source mess.
So most likely, if most of the employees moved over to Microsoft, they wouldn't get the same comp, at most 44% of the company would.
Yes, the "you guys" average HN demographic per the gp comment.
They would have to create some kind of crazy structure to avoid wrecking their levels. But of course it could be done.
If the valuation goes up x10 after next round average developer probably will have the same money locked in rsu/options.
Not the person you are replying to, but it depends on how diluted it gets. If they print 9x of currently outstanding shares as the value goes 10x, it would result in those original shares being worth exactly the same as before the 10x jump.
But I agree with you overall, in terms of the actual reality. I don’t think any company with half a brain would do that.
I'm not talking about key people, about first 50 employees, etc. Regular people.
I'm pretty sure it doesn't work like that due to the existence of leverage. You can make MSFT have the potential to 10x (or ÷10) if you want.
there's no way you guys would get the same comp though? like not even close. MSFT irrespective of how much it wants you is not going to honor the 10X increase in valuation from the upcoming $90 billion valuation.
Even if they do, you will miss on the upside. MSFT stock is not going to 10X but OpenAI's might.