In order to make it worthwhile to offer more, we need to make employees way more savvy when it comes to evaluating offer terms. Otherwise companies might be giving away more but not actually winning more offers.

Almost none (easily sub 5%) of the people we made offers to at Dropcam understood basic offer economics at time of offer. Fully-diluted percentage vs number of shares, future value vs current value, strike prices, long term capital gains and early exercise, you name it — it was mostly Greek to them, and we often lost offers just because someone wanted to work at a unicorn (for a lower present value, and now we know empirically a much lower future value as well).

You might think that the best hires are also better at understanding offer economics. I found almost no correlation between it and interview or job performance. It would have been more effective to split our stock to get higher share numbers in our offers than to actually make better offers. Or getting an investor to buy 1 share for $100 so we could claim a $1b valuation.

How can we make employees more savvy? I think it would make a huge difference if they were, with more employees acting as good investors and spending their time at companies that truly matter.