Re:The market doesn't care about your overpriced valuation (...
by epistasis on Tuesday August 07, 2012 @10:37PM
(#4353583)
No, that's not right (might as well make it three comments in a row :)
THere's no strike price on recent Facebook employee's equity; they receive RSUs, not stock options.
Edit: here's an article describing it a bit more: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-ipo-stock-price-recr... Due to many different employee's RSUs vesting in very small time window, there could be a whole bunch of other problems with flooding the market, as well as the and tax difficulties for employees that can't spread out their RSU income over multiple years.
Re:The market doesn't care about your overpriced valuation (...
by btilly on Tuesday August 07, 2012 @10:58PM
(#4353642)
I didn't realize that they were using RSUs. That does change the equation.
I would be curious what a tax lawyer would say about AMT liability. But AFAIK you're right, there is no problem.
Anyone hired after their valuation was fairly high who was given options would be given options with a high strike price. If the stock never gets there, those options are worth nothing.
A large part of the people who were hired in the last year, with apparently generous option packages, now have Facebook on the resume and no golden handcuffs holding them. And a lot of other employees who had golden handcuffs are going to be thinking about places to bail. This could give them a significant retention problem.