[rdl]

I'd probably have a range for the req (based on budget), and make an offer with two points (specific to the employee). The market is weird enough now that if you wanted to hire an SSL protocol expert, you might end up hiring someone with 2-3 years of general security and dev experience who has read the book, or someone who is EAY, and even the first option might be better than no one in many roles.

I've heard Palantir does three offers, and taking the top cash one is a bad signal.

Also, I think employees undervalue equity, and there's a weird signaling/etc. effect where shitty companies give out equity freely, good companies don't. Cash is cash, though.

[tptacek]

I strongly agree with the last part of your comment; I think that nails my uneasiness about this particular offer.

[dkador]

You think that if a company offers a sizable equity percentage as part of their comp it signals something negative about that company?

[rdl]

Yes, if the founders of a company, who have the best visibility into the company, don't value their equity, it's a waving red flag on fire. Either they are idiots (inexperienced at best, incompetent more likely), or company = doomed.

Obviously offering tptacek 5% in a company isn't bad, but offering an office admin 5% is.

[tptacek]

This person isn't an office admin. I don't know where that notion is coming from (elsewhere on the thread, I assume), but it's a little disturbing.

[bmm6o]

I didn't read the comment as referring to the author as an admin, it was just offering a lowly position stand-in in the current hypothetical.

[rdl]

Yeah, that was that I intended -- a general example. Given her previous salary of $116k+, she was obviously in some kind of professional/technical IC or low level manager role before.

[dkador]

(Couldn't reply directly to you, rdl, sorry.)

I agree that offering an office manager 5% is silly and offering a founder-level person 5% could make sense. I guess I was more curious to see what you think the right ranges are.

[rdl]

In a company which is post accelerator and has raised $1-2mm, without being an absurd success or abject failure, I value equity for employees using a valuation of 0.5-0.75x the cap on convertible debt if you were to issue the debt right now. I have no idea how to handle this at Series A or beyond; a bridge I will burn when I come to it. You may adjust this based on whether you view investor money as particularly cheap (which varies by segment), how long since you raised, etc. The main thing is it should be consistent across employees at a given time.

(So, e.g., a $10mm cap note company which has raised $2mm would treat each 1% of employee equity as $50-$75k. So giving up $25k in cash salary should get you, as a 4 year grant, 2% to 1.3% equity. That is in line with the 0.5-1% for a seed stage 5-7y experience strong individual contributor equity, which is a slightly low amount; generally I've seen 0.1-0.25% for 3-5y experience Series A hires, on say a $20-30mm valuation, which also is in line with this.)

The annoying thing is a company wants to discount equity to employees at 0.5-0.75x. Engineers often discount it to 0.1, especially people who have been burned in the past (90% of people in the first bubble, ex-Zynga people, etc. If you're negotiating with someone who irrationally discounts equity, just pay him more cash and pocket the difference).

A Google SSE or Staff Eng is about $200-225k on the market (total comp), a 3-5 year guy is more like 125-150k, and a very junior person is 75-100k. You can allocate that among perks, equity, bonus, %, and base in various ways.

There is basically no way to use just above-market salary to hire good people, but lack of market salary can get people to rule you out. I've worked at companies where ~everyone got $150k cash + strong equity (0.25-1%), and it ended up just being mercenary people who worked there and remained, due to other defects in corporate culture. (I've also worked in a 200-500k cash-comp-only environment, and the quality of people was inferior to any startup I've ever seen.)

You can probably get people to sacrifice 0-25% of total comp (and maybe up to 50% for short periods of time, like 3-6mo until financing). They are only willing to do that if they think it is "fair", which means they have good odds of doing well on the deal, and others in the company, particularly founders, make similar sacrifices. If a founder is paying himself $150k/yr, and is trying to negotiate a $225k Staff Engineer hire to take $50k cash + $50k equity, you'll probably only get the most self-sacrificing and useless person to join. If a founder is paying himself $30k and is trying to get a $225k SE to take $70k/yr until Series A (6mo), then $120k, plus $50k of equity, and some other perks ("not being at Google of 2012" seems like a serious perk for a lot of the people I've talked to), you'd have a shot.

The best way to allocate equity that I've seen was the 'allocate by cohort' strategy (I forget who proposed this...maybe hn user joshu? or suster or feld or someone). Basically all of your hires at seed stage get x%. All of your hires from Series A to Series B get x% also. But your first pool is split across 5 people, and your second pool is split across 25 people. It is way easier for me to understand the relative importance of the 5 people hired during seed stage vs. figuring out their time/risk weighted importance in a company all the way to IPO.

[tptacek]

That's roughly analogous to Joel Spolsky's "striped allocation" concept, from his Stack Overflow answer on the same topic.

[rdl]

Yes! My memory for attribution is poor.

[joshu]

Not me, sorry.

Btw my return across all angel investments starting as convertible notes is rougghly .9x. Whether I am any good at allocating funds long term remains to be seen.

For my own startup, we allocate equity per a model we built based on historical allocations. And then we beat it by a fair bit.

[dorkitude]

Until you're profitable (i.e. while you're still dependent on venture funding), my thinking is that equity is cash: the two are convertible quantities, with the conversion rate being based on our company's likely next valuation or cap.

If, as a founder, you give up so much equity that your option pool is totally depleted at the next funding round, then 10-20% will need to go to an option pool top-of -- and there's that much less equity to sell to the new investors, meaning less cash can flow into the coffers. Spending equity costs the company cash.

Meanwhile, if you spend double the cash of another startup in the same stage, your runway depletes doubly fast, and you need to raise sooner. Spending cash costs the company equity.

[davidhperry]

Interesting. Do you know what happens to the folks who take all cash vs. one of the other offers?

[rdl]

I know of no employees who took the mostly-cash offer, but that may be a selection bias on my part; I've never worked for Palantir, and am just friends/hang out with people who particularly care about their job (independent of where they work), don't have children or other major cash obligations, and are libertarian tax-minimizers. Those people are highly likely to shoot for highest EV (vs. low risk) and pushing as much income to capital gains as possible.