| > There is no private market in place yet but that is also meant to change end of year; I am not entirely familiar with the concept and how this impacts the comp evaluation A company may decide to join/setup some private market to make it easier for insiders to sell their shares, and also know the price being offered for them, but this is not a prerequisite to selling shares. Even if the company doesn't follow through, you should be able to sell your shares to a private buyer. It's a pain in the ass and the company has a right of first refusal, but with 98% certainty you will be able to turn stock in a late stage company into cash. > Historically all my employers over-promised on bonus payments; is it legitimate to ask for their track record on target bonus payments on the C-level? I definitely think it is fair to ask about track record, but you should also ask how you will be evaluated. I don't know if there are clear targets in your line of work that you will be measured against or not, but it might be clearer how achievable that is depending on how they plan to evaluate your performance wrt targets. I've found US companies to be surprisingly good at paying bonuses to engineers, though they are not 50% bonuses so maybe they don't care as much to play games. If I were you I would get to know how pre-IPO stock works in a bit more detail, it's a very big part of this offer. Assuming the numbers you have are right it's ~280k/yr in ISOs. The biggest question you should answer is where the $9 came from. If they just took the headline valuation number from their last funding round and divided it by the number of shares, it is probably an over-estimate since investors over-pay in terms of valuation to secure downside protections like liquidation preferences. You should learn what liquidation preferences are; you could try ask the company about what liquidation preferences/etc investors have, and maybe they'll even tell C-level hires :) Depending on how much research you want to do, you could try and do some research on how much a private investor would pay for shares in the company now to get an accurate view of how much the stock is really worth today. But this might be getting in to the weeds. You could ask the company too, though I dunno how much help they would be. Most companies internally price some optimism into their ISOs when handing them out. |
> You should be able to sell your shares to a private buyer.
Is there a particular "terminology" to this ability I should ensure I confirm with the company?
> you should also ask how you will be evaluated
Great point and on my list.
> The biggest question you should answer is where the $9 came from.
It is indeed the number from the latest founding round 2 years ago so I assume it to be high.
> you could try ask the company about what liquidation preferences
Assuming this relates to preferred stocks and if they have been issues to investors? On my list of questions.
> Depending on how much research you want to do, you could try and do some research on how much a private investor would pay for shares
Any idea how you would go about it?
Thanks again for your great input. Much appreciated.