Could not agree more: "the practice of equity administration is systemically biased against employees" (and to protect companies and investors). Equity admin i

Could not agree more: "the practice of equity administration is systemically biased against employees" (and to protect companies and investors). Equity admin isn't just a mess for startups but can be a mess for mature companies, too. If you have a chance to interview a manager before accepting an offer, I highly recommend asking them how well Finance has their shit together. You don't want to, say, get in a fight with the General Counsel over stock... I had major stock admin issues at a fairly mature (then 6-year-old) company that is now public. Soon after I started, my boss promised me a follow-on stock award for good performance but failed to do any of the paperwork. I only discovered this issue when I later requested HR to audit my paperwork, and I ended up having to fight our General Council (who was also on the board) for an ENTIRE QUARTER over this mess. The GC not only badgered me but completely mislead me and had the board change my grant without my signature on the final agreement in order save his face (and likely the company from running into trouble with pre-IPO auditors). It took a ton of painful arguments with my boss (and revelations that he had other 'broken' stock promises) to finally get that stock re-awarded. To save HIS face he ended up giving a bunch of my colleagues pre-IPO stock bonuses too (though some had that 'fuck-off' back-weighted 10/20/30/40 vesting). The whole process unfortunately obliterated the trust in the relationship and made /vesting/ the (mostly) restored stock very, very painful. If the law, regulations, and administration were a lot more straightforward, I doubt any of this would have ever happened. (Well, if my boss and the General Council would have owned up to their mistakes, that would have helped, too :) . Something like eShares might have also enabled my company to let non-management employees do 83(b)s leading up to what turned out to be a highly successful IPO. eShares is nice, but some sort of basic, open-source and free baby gate would be a huge help, too. When managers have so much control over employee compensation, it's really easy for them to fuck things up (intentionally or not).