For the last 16 years, I've mostly worked with startups. Most of them have offered me stock options. I've never made a penny from stock options. I don't take st

For the last 16 years, I've mostly worked with startups. Most of them have offered me stock options. I've never made a penny from stock options. I don't take stock options seriously. If the goal is to find a way to give me an incentive to work hard, then stock options don't work for me, because I don't believe in them. They lack enough believability for me to get emotionally amped about them. And yet, that kind of excitement is suppose to be the point, yes? The startup that hires me has the option of simply paying me a salary in exchange for my professional services. But they want me to be excited enough that I'll work lots of 60 and 70 hour weeks. So they want to give me an extra incentive. So they offer stock options, but as I said, for me personally, stocks options fail completely as an incentive. I could also write a long comment about how often I get into negotiations that take the form of "We'd like to offer you less salary, but more stock options". Ha ha ha, if I was that dumb, why would you want to hire me? The problem is, there are too many things that can go wrong with stock options. The biggest, of course, is that most startups fail, and therefore most stock options have zero value. Or as Paul Graham once said, the median long-term value for any startup in any startup investment fund is $0 -- and that implies the median value of any startup stock option is $0. The article lists many other things that can go wrong with stock options -- dilutions, side deals, etc. I can think of some incentives that would actually motivate me. They would be expensive, but that is the point -- they would put real money in play, which would make them worse from the point of view of the company, but would make them real to me. They could then work as an actual incentive. One such incentive would be for the company to agree to commit a percentage of gross revenue to the workers. Say, 2%, or 4%. Then lets say, for every dollar we are paid from our salary, we get 1 royalty point, and the gross revenue fund is divided up on the basis of how many royalty points we all have. As much as I laugh at the line "We'd like to offer you less salary, but more stock options", if I seriously believed that a startup was going to do well, then hell yes I would take a salary cut now in exchange for a percent of a pot that is guaranteed to get a committed amount of gross revenue. I'll point out that Hollywood has been a trailblazer in this regard. It used to be an industry joke that actors were promised a percent of the "profits", but then with creative accounting, even very successful films could be shown to lack any profits, and therefore nothing needed to be paid to the actors. Because of the unfairness of those deals, Hollywood has moved toward royalty payments that are increasingly based on something like gross revenue.