There's a real danger for young tech employees to put too much faith into models like these. A nice probabilistic graph appeals to our logical and mathematical

There's a real danger for young tech employees to put too much faith into models like these. A nice probabilistic graph appeals to our logical and mathematical sensibilities by appearing to cover the range of possibilities and giving some well-reasoned projection of likelihood, but it doesn't account for the human element. Picking a successful startup with growing valuation is just the prerequisite, if you are lucky enough to do that then the likelihood of getting a good payout from stock options becomes dominated by the behavior of the board of directors and the founders. So actually the number one question is: do you trust the founder(s) to look out for their employee's interests? Number two question is: are the founder(s) savvy enough to avoid investors triggering scenarios that totally screw early employees (dilution, liquidation prefs, etc)? These are super hard questions to answer even for savvy veterans, and probably totally outside the depth of the inexperienced young people flooding into tech right now. I don't think its responsible to advise young people to give significant value to options based on spurious models. Instead I'd recommend they go read Steve Blank: https://medium.com/@sgblank/startup-stock-options-why-a-good-deal-has-gone-bad-5e711d9819b7 https://medium.com/@sgblank/startup-stock-options-why-a-good...