The financial incentive to stay is continued vesting of presumably more-valuable options, about which you have inside knowledge -- the state of development, the

The financial incentive to stay is continued vesting of presumably more-valuable options, about which you have inside knowledge -- the state of development, the sales pipeline, high performance from founders, a deeper understanding of the industry, etc. It doesn't take much job hunting to realize as an employee you're taking a bigger risk than the company. There's some crazy people out there and some really terrible bosses. The same way it's really difficult to evaluate an employee in an interview it's just as hard to evaluate a working environment, a boss, whether the ceo is a meddler with the attention span of a hummingbird, etc. A sane boss with a solid development process that doesn't encourage late nights or lead to incredibly fragile software and/or heroic, stressful ops efforts is worth a hell of a lot. You just want to leverage golden handcuffs to retain employees... I think honesty all around is the best method. Unfortunately, that further devalues the (already low imo / in my advice) value of options and suggests people are much better off going to established companies.