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Comment by zamnos | Hacker News Reader

> Thus far no successful tech company (that I know of) has screwed over its employees by casually choosing not to have a liquidity event

It depends on if you want to rank Foursquare as "successful", but they recently did that, and it was big news in the don't-let-RSUs-expire community.

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-private-tech-com...

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Holy shit. Can't believe that didn't make it to HN. You really should price startup equity compensation at zero. Even if the startup becomes successful.

You must be new to startups.

Uber and Foursquare are often used as examples on what not to do regarding equity and IPOs

What did Uber do?

So it depends on when you invested in Uber. Because late stage investors (which includes employees compensated with equity) didn't make life changing amounts of money because the price since IPO has actually gone down, unlike, say Apple. But everyone forgets that the VCs, who are the real players in this game, angle invested at sub-cent strike prices. Approximately, what's the math on how much you make if you sell a hundred million shares at $40, with a strike price of $0.0001. Compare that to a later employee 100k shares with a strike price of $39.50.

IMO this is one of the main drivers of big tech in recent years. Folks stopped viewing startups as a lottery ticket a few years ago.

They’re lottery tickets for founders only. Everyone else worse really hard for substandard income and gains valuable experience.

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