The 2015 Wealth Report
content.knightfrank.com
content.knightfrank.com
Just for example, Dustin Moscovitz says that employee number 100 made $200M at Facebook[1]. Imagine the number that made $30M, and that's just one company (see slide 14).
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/dustin-moskovitzs-startup-adv...
The other option is that they were somewhat early in something that took off like Google/Facebook, that's still probably not more than a few dozen over the $30 million mark each. So the number makes sense to me at least.
In addition, it was much harder to make $10mm before the .com era.
It may be they are not counting paper wealth in private companies. It may also be that many of these $1bn+ valuations came in the last year or so (their data is from 2013.)
Non-founders rarely, if ever, are given that much equity (commonly cited numbers tend to top out around 2%). The most likely candidates are engineer #1 and an early VP, but engineer #1 has likely been diluted by over 30% since seed stage and even the exec will have been diluted by 10~20%.
At $5BB, a nonfounder needs about 0.6% of the company. By this point though, dilution is usually even more severe, and engineer #1 will likely have had his/her initial share cut by close to 50%. This means that only the earliest of early employees, along with the VP level hires, will have $30MM at a typical $5BB startup (though $5BB startups are hardly typical).
It's the companies that are another order of magnitude higher in valuation that mint wealth of that kind to dozens of employees.
[1] ignoring liquidity preference for the sake of simplicity.
That being said, MM is more necessary because "M" also denotes 1000, and can thus be ambiguous.
Anyway, thanks, next time I see it, I guess I will not be confused.
MM = 1000 * 1000
NMM = 1000 * 1000 * 1000
pp = pages
ll = lines
so it's a natural logical extrapolation to go for
bb = billions
"Today, there are more than 80 unicorns, or companies with a valuation of at least $1.0 billion—that’s more than double the number last year, and, according to CB Insights, just three fewer than the last three years combined. As for unicorn exits: 2014 saw almost twice as many billion-dollar exits (32) as 2013 (17)." (http://www.forbes.com/sites/truebridge/2015/03/09/too-many-u...)
It's hard to tell if the "80 unicorns" includes the 49 exits from 2013 and 2014, although the wording (to me) suggests they do not. Regardless, many of these companies have co-founders and an early CTO hire often gets ~5-7% in options (which are then diluted, granted.) Also, if the minimum to be included is $1bn, then the average is somewhat higher (although not too much higher, given the shape of the distribution.)
So, between the 2-5 people who might own more than 2-5% of the company, the 80-129 unicorns over the past few years, and the average unicorn valuation of $1.5bn to $3bn, all somewhat informed guesses, my swag was about 200 people with paper net worth of >$30mm. I mean, you could easily see a company like Slack, which grew very quickly, having 4 or 5.
Of course, per the referenced paper, these people probably aren't flying much on private jets since, to my knowledge, NetJets doesn't accept unexercised stock options as boarding passes.
There are very, very few cash exits of $1B+ in any given year. And far less than the majority of those have rights that allow employees, or even founders, to cash out at, for example, the sky high initial IPO market cap pop price.
526 doesn't seem a low estimate to me. Unless your counting unrealized paper Gaines... Before tax, and which often do not pan out upon liquidation the way a naive reading would imply they will on paper.
You can actually see how much money FB's top shareholders were worth at their IPO. Very, very few employees made over $10M. TEN. Before tax.
A lot of people front in SF / the Bay Area. Very, very few are worth over $30M in liquid net worth.
Correction: The S-1 listed only a handful of the top people.
before taxes and assuming he never sold any of the stock until now