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Comment by tempsy | Hacker News Reader

Define “most people”. $10k maybe a lot for a new grad but isn’t if you’ve worked even just a few years, especially in a high paying role in tech elsewhere.

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I'm one of those "most people" right now.

I make a a great wage and have savings in the bank. However I have a 6 month old baby at home and a wife who is taking time off from her career to look after our baby. I also left a job I was at for almost 5 years and exercised my options on the way out. This cost me almost $30k in cash. At my new job early exercising would cost me nearly $40k. Spending $40k to early exercise this startup's equity grant feels like it might be a little irresponsible. It wouldn't surprise me at all if other people didn't have that much lying around.

These types of companies self select for people who are comfortable taking on more risk. If this is your thought process why would you even put yourself in a situation where you pick an offer from a company that offers options as part of your comp over RSUs or a public company?

I don’t doubt that many people have the same thought process, but if I decline to early exercise from a company that offers that option the alternative is a massive tax bill down the road that I didn’t need to pay if the company does remotely well.

I selected the company I'm at because they offered me the highest salary of all the places I was interviewing. They also have a product in domain I'm very familiar with and are a size that would allow me to have a big impact on the engineering org. Basically this opportunity checked all the boxes I set out to check when I decided to leave my last job.

I'll vest my options here without exercising and if they turn into something one day that'll be nice. In the meantime I'll collect the nice salary I negotiated for myself and grow my career the way I wanted.

Edit:

A little clarification about my last role. I took that job because they were using tech I wanted to learn and they had a team I wanted to work with. They also offered me salary that was a healthy bump from where I was at at the time. I didn't early exercise those options back then because I didn't know enough about the company to justify plunking down the cash. After being there nearly 5 years I believe in the company a lot and see the exercise as a smart investment. I don't have that clarity yet for my current role and so it just doesn't make sense to me to early exercise.

If you're working at a small tech startup, you're likely not making a huge salary. Good, sure, but not huge. It's possible you left your high-paying FAANG job to be developer #3 at a tiny little startup, but in my experience this almost never happens.

Also, $10k is a lot of money. Even if you have it in savings (and I'd agree a lot of tech people technically do), it's a huge gamble on an unknown startup. You're already gambling your time; now you're supposed to also gamble your money?

if that’s truly how you feel why would you accept an offer where that’s how a significant percentage of your compensation works?

these types of work environments self select for people who are comfortable taking on risk. no one is forcing you or anyone else to join.

People can have a variety of different comfort levels with different kinds of risk. You’re suggesting that someone should consider a slightly lower salary + future possible earnings on options as equivalent to slightly lower salary + future possible earning on options - risk of loss on early exercise. Some people work for startups, some are angel investors, there is some overlap but it’s not 1:1 and it’s because those are different types of risk.

The point is that it sucks and is largely avoidable.

Sure people can not work at companies that don't provide 10 year exercise options. Its not like they are slaves.

But that doesn't mean there aren't better ways of structuring options and it is bad to point this out.

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