Were you able to sell? What platform did you use? Were you able to sell w/o board approval? If so, were you able to use private forward contracts to complete a deal?
Anything you can tell me about the experience would be much appreciated!
That's why it's useful for a handful of people to have showdead enabled: so that good questions or comments lost to antispam/antitroll filters can be fished out from the abyss.
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As for questions like "Were you able to sell w/o board approval," I feel like this depends on the terms of the agreement, no? I mean I'm keen on hearing the data for the sake of having a dataset, but the question itself doesn't seem to be immediately relevant unless the person answering the question happens to work at the same company as the person asking the question.
(1) HN's only value to YC is the community; (2) the community only comes here to the extent that it finds HN interesting; (3) therefore, to optimize HN's value, we have to optimize it for being interesting. Moderating for parochial interest (e.g. suppressing things that some $ingroup doesn't like—VCs or whoever else) would make HN less interesting, so we don't.
We also don't do it because (a) it would be wrong and (b) it would feel bad, but those concerns don't belong in a cynical argument. YC's business interests, however, do belong in such an argument, and it's very much in YC's business interest to keep this community as happy as possible. That's a sort of miracle if you think about it—a freak of economic nature—so we should all enjoy it for as long as possible.
Past explanations in case anyone wants more:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23284262
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
p.s. The OP was originally killed by a software filter—those are tuned more aggressively for new accounts. Fortunately other users vouched for the post, which unkilled it long before mods saw it. That's the vouching feature working as intended. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch.
As an aside, thanks ... to a large degree I enjoy this community because of the effort to keep the discussion civil (sometimes embracing debate over argument) and that I can learn at least a little about fields outside my own. It's much appreciated.
DM if I can help with more info, experience with each company was essentially the same and you should just reach out to all of them to see who has inbound buy requests at the highest price. Worth noting that there is more room for negotiation on price than you might expect.
Add your email address to the About Me section if you want to be reachable.
Worried about getting (or even asking for) board approval - what incentive would they have to allow an employee to reduce their stake in the companies success prior to an IPO event?
It's possible for the company to dilute your shares turning them worthless, and then generates new shares. I'm sure there's lots of examples you can find of dilution, but that was what FB did to the former CFO as shown in the movie "The Social Network".
People keep talking about working for soulless companies when deciding to work for startups, but I can't think of a more soulless way to screw over your employees.
The greatest risk is the company won't be successful and your shares will be worthless.
Example: Cap table: Founder 10%, ex-employees 10%, VC 80%
Step 1) Company takes a down round, VC put some small money in, dilutes everyone 10:1.
Step 2) New stock plan with 10% for founder
Cap table: Founder 11%, ex-employees 1%, VC 88%
Step 3) Founder and VC high-five
Can you clarify that?
That is a co-founder of a high profile unicorn with continuous growth. Now imagine what can happen to employee # 1000 at a shady middle cap startup struggling to get to market.
My main concern is around requiring board approval. There isn't any formal policy for employees seeking liquidity, and I'm not sure the board will be receptive.
I mean, what incentive would they have to allow employees to sell their shares before an IPO/exit event?
yes, the company allowed people to sell up to 25% of vested shares if you were employed for more than 24 months
>What platform did you use?
Carta
> Were you able to sell w/o board approval? If so, were you able to use private forward contracts to complete a deal?
No
Structured as contracts for future stock from current employees that get transferred to you after the ipo (and usually 6 month lockup) are complete.
I got 100% of the uber stock (about 1x return) about 99.8% of the airbnb (about 2.5x return) and depending on if/when reddit ipos (was looking good for 10x a few months back but unlikely now) it will be interesting to see how much of the stock i get if it has gone up massively since initial purchase.
You mean from the employees backing out somehow?
If you sold rights to your stock for a million 5 years ago and now it is worth 15 million and still in your possession, it would be tempting to sell it asap and move to brazil and let the lawyers come and find you.
The deals did need board approval, but it seemed like it was more to determine whether they wanted to exercise the right of first refusal (they did in the first deal and did not in subsequent), but maybe standard terms have changed since the rise of secondary market platforms. It was a bit nerve-wracking the first time since I didn't know what I was doing and I was most likely the first person to do it at the company, but it ended up working out fine (probably also worth noting I was no longer an employee at the time of the deals). Good luck!
If you can find a buyer for a certain amount, you can sell for that amount. The company can just opt to be the buyer.
It means they have to match the offer or let you sell. It’s exactly like a national best bid guarantee in a real market.
I'm curious if anyone has done it without by using a private contract between buyer/seller (google: forward contracts).