A friend asks:
I’m working through a start up analysis based on a web-based software app. What is “options consistent” with a start up?
The short answer: show the prospective employee a 5-figure number, and convince the employee that it makes sense.
The long answer:
This is highly dependent upon the type of startup and the position of the employee. I’ll answer for a typical situation of a VC-backed startup and a developer from entry-level to senior (sub-exec) level. You could have a very different answer for startup that was not VC funded, or an executive level position. You might even have a slightly different answer for non-developers, certainly in the areas of marketing, administration, customer support. (I’m putting aside for the moment the question of whether it is “right” to treat execs or different functional areas differently.)
Many propspective employees seem to take a highly illogical view of evaluating startup options. They compare the raw number to that in their other offers, or to offers that their friends received. (“Well I think I deserve at least 30,000 shares in this company, because my friend Jonny got 20,000 shares in his company, and he’s an idiot!”)
This seems nonsensical because the value of the options must be calculated with respect to the specific company situation, especially in terms of the company’s existing capitalization and prospects for liquidity and growth. Having 20,000 shares in a company that has 10 million shares outstanding is, absent other facts, five times more valuable than 20,000 shares in a company that has 50 million shares outstanding. That’s simple enough, but it is by far less important than the other main factor. Having 20,000 shares in a company that is about to go public might be much more valuable than having 20,000 shares in a company that has just started.
Might be. Or might not. What if the company that has just started is the next Google, as they all think they are? The problem here is that you have to evaluate both distance to liquidity and prospects for growth. Figuring out which startups will be successful and when and how big they can get is extraordinarily difficult — these are things that professional money managers routinely get wrong. A prospective employee has very little hope in getting this evaluation right.
So let’s look at it from the other side: how do companies decide how many options to offer employees? Typically a company budgets a particular target of dilution from issuances of options over 12 to 18 months. For an early stage startup, this target is often around 15–20% of total capitalization (including the options pool). A one-year hiring plan in that stage might call for something like one new executive, 3 senior employees, and 12 employees from entry to mid level. So the company would budget its options accordingly, obviously also aligning grants with external market conditions.
A prospective employee who wants to know whether an offered grant is “fair” really has no better method of evaluating this than by asking the company to explain how they came up with the number. Ideally as an employee you’d want to ask:
- What’s the fully diluted capitalization?
- How far is the company from liquidity? What type of liquidation event does the company anticipate?
- What are the company’s business prospects for the current year?
- What is the options range for my position, and where am I in this range relative to other recent hires?
- How far into the hiring plan is the company for the current year? How many and what positions will be hired?
And you ask these questions not because you can actually value the company based on the answers. You ask as a test to see if the hiring manager has thought through the offer, and sounds as if there has been rational thought behind your compensation. You want to work at a place where the management can provide sensible answers to these questions, independent of whether the answers can add up to a company valuation.
Many candidates do not feel comfortable asking these kinds of questions. Worse, some companies will not answer them, and will view the asking of such questions as a sign of impudence. I’d say you should think twice about working for any company that would be insulted by the asking of these questions, but unfortunately that company attitude is not uncommon.
As a result, the best guideline to fall back upon for many prospective employees is back to good old Jonny: What have I been offered at other companies, and what are my friends getting at their companies?
Which turns out to be not such a dumb way of evaluating offers, because many companies use more or less the same budgeting processes and have similar investor and advisor networks. So most companies end up in a similar range of options for similar positions. For most mid-to-senior positions, this will be a 5-figure number, and as long as that number can be justified to the employee, then you can move on to more important questions, such as why anyone would want to work at this company in the first place. There should be a lot of answers to that question, and the options offer should be only a very small piece of the puzzle.
