[HelgeSeetzen]

It's actually fairly straightforward to achieve. What you want is a structure that rewards people linearly for the time that they contributed to the company relative to the "duration" of the company. To achieve this you only need two mechanism: 1. All incentive equity goes away if the employee is terminated for cause or leaves during probation (some number of months, we use 3). 2. For all other scenarios the employee gets to keep TE/TC shares (the rest are re-purchased if you are using reverse vesting or don't vest if you use options).

TC = Time of the Company from founding to liquidity event in days (or weeks as long as the unit is small relative to the expected duration of the company)

TE = Time in days that the employee worked at the company

It's actually really that simple. Obviously other factors like impact, performance, seniority, etc. play a role but those get adjusted by the magnitude of the stock grant and not the vesting process. We use a reverse vesting shares to give employees tax advantages but the same concept could work for vesting options.

The advantage of this approach is that everything is nice and linear (expect the 3 months probation cliff). A lot of sneaky behaviour is just not worth it when things are linear. Remember, lack of alignment is the big killer of start-ups.