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Comment by apatheticonion | Hacker News Reader

I hate this whole options/RSU strategy companies chain us with. You sit there waiting for a liquidation event or IPO with no guarantees on either.

The longer you stay, the harder it is to leave.

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As a founder who has gone from seed to IPO we have never intentionally employed this strategy for non executive hires.

We also allowed liquidity at each funding round.

A lot of the reason the system is setup how it is is due to IRS tax rules that make it very hard to give equity at the later stages of a company. If you just give shares then the employees will have a tax bill day one on an illiquid security.

Workarounds are complicated, and things like this are the result. I think Bolt’s issues are more due to arrogance than malice.

This is why, when you’re looking at job offers, cash in the bank now is ALWAYS better than anything else they can offer.

And with RSUs, at least they are real stocks in a trading account that you can immediately sell and cash out when they vest. Options on the other hand are the worst. Consider them to be worthless.

I'm a founder. I agree, it's a scam. The constraint I bump up against is that VCs expect standard terms which means that stock options will be granted with tight post-exit expiry schedules. The best we've managed to do is to give people the right to 83b election. The whole structure creates such an adverse situation for employees - forcing people who are usually not in a position to take risk (like this guy) into a risk position and a taxable event.

If anyone has good workarounds for seed-Series B level companies, I'd love to hear.

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