[eerrt]

Do the early employees get a huge payout on their options?

[lowercased]

Perhaps they'll just get visa gift cards... ;)

[ryanSrich]

Even if they had really shitty agreements I bet they'll see something substantial. Reports are saying it was a 5.3 billion purchase price. That's a lot of money for 400 employees.

[alecbenzer]

Having 400 employees doesn't say much about how equity is distributed, though. E.g., (made up numbers, I know nothing about Plaid's comp specifically) if an employee gets 1 basis point over 4 years, that's 0.01% * $5.3 billion / 4 = $132,500, which combined with a startup salary might land you at around Google L4.

[harryh]

Unless plaid's equity structure was very unusual, early employees (at least in engineering) certainly received much much more than 1 basis point.

[alecbenzer]

Sure, but what's early? I don't think it's unheard of to get to O(1 basis point) at 100s of employees.

I've seen an offer at a ~50 person company for 1-2 basis points.

[shamir]

The early employees will get millions of dollars. This is 1)an unreasonably large amount of money for anybody to make or 2)nothing compared to the billions that the founders and venture investors will make.