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Comment by abalone | Hacker News Reader

The whole point of options is to not have to offer above-market-rate salaries to attract great talent to infant startups.

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Perhaps infant startups do not deserve "great talent". Engineers shouldn't have to give up cash for lottery tickets, especially when many founders won't even include the number of outstanding shares, preferences, etc. in the options agreement!

Said engineers do not have to take startup jobs. Unless they do due to lack of options elsewhere.

That's not an excuse for dishonesty on the part of startups.

If you had the outstanding shares and preferences in the options agreement wouldn't you have to have everyone resign every time someone exercised their options (changing the number of outstanding shares) or they raised money?

However I agree founders should be up front about the financial/investor makeup of the company.

I got my options agreement which said I was entitled to N options at P price. No other information was provided, so not sure how I'm supposed to value them other than $0.

I assume that the options are intended for people that are bad at math.

>I assume that the options are intended for people that are bad at math.

It does appear to be a way to get employees for cheaper than market rates by taking advantage of an arbitrage in employee lack of understand of the financial and legal issues concerning stocks.

The size of the options pool is good enough. You don't need to know the exact number of shares; plus or minus 10 percent is fine.

And we've seen that it is a terrible solution which is rife for abuse on the side of the startup.

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