3 ms·

[rhetorical question] How is it possible that a company has tens of millions of users, IPOs, and the common stock is worthless? That's basically theft from your

• wavefunction 9y ago
  Where's corporate profit in your equation? Exactly.
• weirdstuff 9y ago
  [rhetorical answer] By offloading as much economic risk as possible on to producers with the least means of asserting corrective action in case of inequitable decision making. (In other words pass losses on to employees and guarantee [as much as possible] returns to investors despite risks.)
• jzl 9y ago
  The common stock isn't "worthless", it's the stock options to later-stage employees that are possibly worthless, or at least worth less than imagined. The lesson here is to never rush to judgement about the value of your options at a startup. You need to think about "how much more will the company be worth when I exercise vs how much it was worth when I joined", vs the less meaningful "I have XXX dollars worth of options". And yes, I am aware of the inherent discount for ISOs, so as an employee you still stand to make about 2/3rds the value of your options if the company is worth about as much as it was when you joined. This makes me a little suspect of the stated $15 strike price for ISOs, that doesn't sound like the typical 2/3 discount unless if the stock was privately worth $30-45/share at grant time.