[bruce511]

Investing in shares is, like most things in life, a task that requires some skill and understanding. Hence the concept of accredited investors. When you're swimming with the big boys, it pays to know the rules of the game.

Unfortunately employees getting or buying shares from their employer have little to no investment skills. Yes, it's possible for these shares to be worth something, but if the company fails, they're last in line.

It behooves tech staff, who think the road to glory is paved in stock options to get professional financial and legal (not to mention tax) advice.

Or just consider all stock offerings to be worthless. The times it isn't are a rounding error.

[terminalshort]

The concept of accredited investors is nothing of the sort. It's an arbitrary income / net worth threshold.

[quickthrowman]

It’s a check for ‘can this person handle losing a large chunk of money when they get swindled by management after investing in a private company’, which will almost certainly be the case if you don’t have more money to kick in every round (dilution) or don’t own preferred shares, or any number of other tricks. Google or Meta recently ‘acquired’ a company by offering them salary packages that matched the equity they had in their company and then skipped buying the company so anyone with shares left got screwed over when the husk was sold for 1% of its prior value, since it was almost worthless once all the talent was acquihired.

[smcin]

Which company was that?

[smcin]

Not Abel.ai, so who?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44640343

[deepsun]

Disagree. I exercised some small amount of options long time ago (like 10+ years). Never called, never cared, also thought it's long gone. But recently got a nice check from them out of the blue when they got sold to a larger company. Even though all the people I worked with long gone as well, including CEO. I checked the numbers, all seems correct.

[bruce511]

I'm not saying there's never an outcome. I'm saying the percentage of positive outcomes is tiny compared to the number of players.

Congrats on the check. But I think you approached it in the right way. Assume they're worth nothing until proved wrong.