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It seems to boil down to having to trust your employer to be honest to their word (and implications) about stock options and what their value really is. Even in
by bhayden 12y ago
It seems to boil down to having to trust your employer to be honest to their word (and implications) about stock options and what their value really is. Even in the most trusted of environments, I still would not fully trust what comes out of the mouth of the person I'm interviewing with since they cannot speak on behalf of any outside investors, (other) founders, or anyone else with a stake in the company.
Given the nature of 99.9% of employer/employee relations, especially in salary negotiation, I would never personally place any value in stock options of any sort. There is simply no verifiable way to calculate what they are worth with a million different ways for them to become worthless and no accountability for a company to be entirely forthcoming.
- mallyvai 12y agoThis is an absolutely silly mentality: 1) A lot of people do make money off of employee stock, you just have to be reasonably intelligent about it. This blog post is a good way to model risk/reward. 2) Thinking of your employer as your enemy is a great way to set yourself up for failure. 3) Don't think of stock as worthless, think of it as a bunch of lottery tickets. It has some probability of being worth something based on the lottery.
- bhayden 12y agoThe lottery comparison would be fair if the organization running the lottery was incentivized to not pay you if you won and could very easily, in both a legal and acceptable-in-the-course-of-businesss way, deny you your winnings. You are basically relying on a huge pool of people who are making the decisions to be a nice guy and true to their word. I'm not suggesting you consider your employer an enemy, there's obvious a mutual benefit to you working there, but never should anyone assume a business has your best interests at heart because they almost never do.