pythoncloner

Just a general advice. I was in same position few months back and i took more than a month to decide.

Before joining seed stage startups, you should verify that whether the existing team can take the startup 100X or not. 1% of 100M exit is nothing but 0.1% of 10B is big deal. You should have interviewed with atleast 5 startups before taking the decision. I interviewed at quite a few startups and i had multiple offers and i finally got the best deal i can ever get. I know that this startup founders are impressive and they are nice and they will do well. But you have to move out of your comfort zone and talk with 5 more startups. Then you will come to know about the startup market.

Please use wealth-front chart to find out whether you are getting right deal or not. https://www.wealthfront.com/tools/startup-salary-equity-comp....

Use www.Offerletter.io to validate that your decision is right or not. They have really great people who knows the startup market better than us. It doesn't cost you anything unless you get 20% more equity during negotiation. Of Course, you will get more than 20% if you negotiate in any company. Talking to them was worth it!

Don't join startups whose selling point is that they will get acquired as well.

Also, if you don't know what's Double Trigger Acceleration now, don't just join startup anytime soon. Read about startups and contact lawyers who are expert in stock options. They charge $300 but they save you $300K - $3M.

P.S: I'm not an expert. But I took more time to decide between offers and it gained me 2X stock options and 1.3X salary to me.

PA as a service. Somebody needs to take care of all my shitty work like paying my bills on time, paying loans, managing my subscriptions. When i move the apartment, some body should take care of the whole end-end flow. I mean they need to search and select some apartments for me, they should plan a move, they come and pack things and ship to new home.

I'm 24 now and made $900 pretax in FB (no college loans).

I think i'm lucky that i joined Facebook after IPO but when the stock was very low. My new grad offer was $280k (negotiated like a VC with tons of counter offers from GOOG, DropBox, etc...) and stock was $19 the day i had joined around Sep 2012. So, i got ~14000 FB shares. I sold all my vested shares(~11000 [9500 vested on my base offer and 1500 out of my refresher grants over last 2 years) at $80 very recently and leaving the company for $1M offer with a startup.

Total Money i made pre-tax: $900k. Bought a Porsche and chilling out in LA for a month now before my next gig. Everyone call me as a lucky kid.

Just accepted an offer of $150k base and $1M in stock options from one of hot startups in SF. I will update here if the startup makes it to IPO in next few years and i made real money more than $500k and stock market does not crash in 2016.

I have accepted a startup offer with stock options 2 days back. The CTO told me about the number of outstanding shares in the company and the last 409(A) valuation and the current valuation they are going to raise funding. But except #options, these details are not specified in the offer letter but i have accepted.

Should i consult a lawyer before i join this company? If so, can you guys recommend some lawyer contacts? I have been in bay area for last one year and i don't have much contacts. Help! Thanks

First of all thanks for the reply.

There are two steps here right? One is to file LCA on behalf of new employer and get H1B receipt notice and other is getting the H1B approved. Did you wait till the second stage?

How long it took for your first step and the second step?

1. How does the startup salary compare to your current salary?

    It's 15% increase on my current salary.

2a. What is the startup option package as a % of the company?

    50 Engineers already and company is of size 300. Options % is around 0.026%.

2b. What is the vesting schedule?

    One year cliff and month by month.

2c. Also -- (i) how big is the startup? (ii) How much money have they raised? (iii) Where is it based? (iv) How much experience do you have?

   They have raised over $50Million and bay area. I have 2.5 years of experience.

How was your experience with offerletter.io? My package is kind of good already. Will offerletter.io help it push further up? Can you share what kind of strategies you have applied to negotiate more?