- Microsoft - straight straight stock award and options
- Atlassian - Pre-IPO straight stock options
- Company you never heard of 1 - RSU pseudo-options
- Company you never heard of 2 - RSU pseudo-options structured a little differently from company 1
Yes, companies can do arbitrarily weird things, like OpenAI's PPUs. No, these aren't common at startups, and there's no one way that beats all the others come tax time.
If you share the stock plan, or at least concrete details, we can get to the bottom of what you're describing. But understandably you aren't likely to do that.
> Essentially, their price is set at FMV at the time of issuance. Since your net is zero at the time of issuance, you pay no taxes until there is a liquidity event and you can pay to cover.
I do believe the broad outcome you experienced, including having an employer file an 83(b) for you, which is rare but possible. I don't believe "RSU's [...] structured as a pseudo-option" is an accurate description of the mechanics involved. At a minimum, it's underspecified, and could lead someone else reading this to make a bad financial assumption down the road.
> is your point that you know more about the topic than I do?
I don't know, was that your point when you wrote "I have four data points to your one"? My only point is that that particular argument isn't a sound basis for dismissing the feedback you're getting, whether from me or from the others who've responded.
On the other hand, you seem hell-bent on winning a pointless argument about my own personal experiences. We both know it has nothing to do with bad financial advice since I've offered none except to speak to an attorney. Again, do you disagree with that advice?
Also, IANAL but my impression is that modern RSU's are a construct created by the legal community to get around and/or comply with the legalities of securities rules around employee compensation. There is not a singular approach on how they are structured. Your experiences may have been the result of lazy legal teams. I have no idea, but I don't doubt them.
RSUs are stock. When you get them, you pay tax on their value at income rates. To deal with this you can delay actually getting the RSUs (e.g. double-trigger vesting, common), or the company itself can provide liquidity for taxes (e.g. Carta's net settlement program, not common).
Either way, 83(b) elections don't apply. They do apply to RSAs and options with early exercise, so maybe you had one of those.
My experience here is as a founder who's spent entirely too many hours with lawyers trying to engineer the most employee-friendly stock plan possible.