Quick summary guide to what you want your option equity grant to be like: 1. Must have an 83(b) election process, and give a bonus to cover pre-exercise cost O

Quick summary guide to what you want your option equity grant to be like: 1. Must have an 83(b) election process, and give a bonus to cover pre-exercise cost OR: 2. No expiry after leaving the company, instead should just convert to NSOs AND 3. If possible, options should expire after 15-20 years with the longer time horizons to IPO today compared to 7 years ago. Facebook for example took 8 years from founding to IPO. Even if you stay employed at facebook for the entire time, you could have lost all of your stock for example. 4. Vesting cliffs should be no longer than 1 year. If you are unwilling or incapable to pre-exercise your startup stock, then equivalent RSU grants are superior to stock option grants. Even most $1bb startup employees have a very hard time finding people to buy their stock outside of company secondaries when the company is private. ---- What you give up at a startup as a sr. engineer vs bigco: 1. Saleable within 1 year +$100k/yr equity grants. These equity grants can then be used in other investments, such as a house down payment or otherwise. Give them a bonus of %7 annual compounded interest. 2. Higher salaries 3. Bonuses 4. Some benefits which may have high amount of financial benefits for your situation, such as paid parental leave. 5. Hours worked. Make sure that the startup offer can beat a big co offer if a +$100mm sale event happens by a good margin. If your startup offer cannot beat that, then working at that startup will have a near certain chance of having a big financial downside compared to working at bigco. Working at bigco is the index fund of tech work, make sure your startup 'investment' at least has a chance of beating the index fund.