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Comment by Harj | Hacker News Reader

We're excited to make 10 years the new standard option exercise window for startup employees. Each of us have personally experienced someone close to us dealing with the stress of trying to exercise their options within 90 days and it sucks.

We'd like to see more companies making this change, we'll be keeping the public list of YC companies who have either implemented or pledged to implement an extended window, updated here: https://triplebyte.com/ycombinator-startups/extended-options

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> We’re advising Triplebyte candidates to favor companies making this change, and we’ve already convinced 12 companies to pledge to do this.

This is incredible.

You might be the first recruiting startup to really advocate for the engineer.

Hey harj! The article and plan is really interesting. I wanted to read more of the details and comparisons, but it seems the link from the sentence "We’ve created a summary of the gory details on both the business and legal aspects here" just brings you to the triplebyte homepage. Do you happen to have a direct link to that page?

Sorry about that, fixed. Here's the link: https://data.triplebyte.com/extending-stock-option-exercise-...

I'm just reading the docs now and I am probably not understanding how they work, but it seems to say that employees have 3 years from the termination date, not 10 years as you mention. I'm assuming I'm misunderstanding how this works.

I dont understand these things much but I think encouraging employees to exercise their options as early as possible is better thing to do when the value of those stocks is dirt cheap.

Sure that works early on but we wanted to get momentum behind a solution that would work for any size/stage of company.

Even after stage A funding, it can be a significant chunk of money.

How was the time period of 10 years picked? It seems rather arbitrary?

As an employee, why would I want a dangling guillotine over my options/compensation?

iirc 10 years is the legal limit.

It's ten years from the date the options are granted, which is how long the options themselves last for.

Why 10 years and not 100 or 1000?

If this is a legal limit, can anyone explain the rationale behind the limit?

Am I correct in reading the blog post that there are no downsides to having 10-year options?

> As Sam Altman wrote, this is an unfair situation and needs to be fixed.

And Ben Horowitz criticized his stance and Sam said he would be rethinking the way he communicated his position. Was that ever taken into consideration?

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