2 ms·

Why don't you share some with the employees?

• Hydraulix989 8y ago
  This. I think this makes the most sense. Your earliest hires took a risk as well by turning down big $$$ from Google, etc. to partake in sharing your vision and gave you this opportunity to cash out by building your company to this point. I'm not sure what the situation looks like, but I've seen startups where the founder(s) have 50-90% of the company and then the first engineer who built the entire tech stack from the ground up has an illiquid ~1-2%. That is pure exploitation.
• davismwfl 8y ago
  While a good sentiment and seemingly fair, it isn't reasonable for a company to offer this to early/all employees early on in the company lifecycle. Two key reasons. First, the early employees stock likely hasn't vested enough to make this reasonable. Second, unless the company has already reached the later levels of say Series C/D and are discussing options around IPO or next round to do XYZ, the investors aren't going to entertain this, except for maybe some select early employees. And founders can't sell their own equity and turn around and pay bonuses to employees out of that, it would involve an accounting nightmare that no investor would like to see on the financials in later rounds. Not to mention that money would be taxed so many times no one but the government would win.