This logic seems dumb, Facebook is a big company, if you're joining Facebook now, even as a star hire, are they really going to throw enough equity at you to make you a millionaire in some unknown future IPO? And you have no idea when the IPO will happen, it could be 10 years before you can liquidate. And you might get screwed over on some dilution or the strike price or something currently undisclosed, private companies are notoriously secretive about their financials.
It's just too many unknowns. I don't think it makes sense to plan your life around hitting this options jackpot.
Attitudes like this is why I had to write a book about startups. In 2003, people said the same thing about Google. It turned out that yes, joining Google in 2003 had a very good chance of making you a millionaire, even if you weren't a star hire.
Guess what? Facebook is in the same situation Google was in 2003 today.
It's the difference between your stock options being worth $0 (in the case of Google), and they being potentially worth 10X (in the case of Facebook). I'd say 10X is a pretty big difference.
Oops. Memories fade. At any rate, my point is that a lot of people have options with a low strike price. I'm not sure what the downfall of the economy has to do with this fact.
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This logic seems dumb, Facebook is a big company, if you're joining Facebook now, even as a star hire, are they really going to throw enough equity at you to make you a millionaire in some unknown future IPO? And you have no idea when the IPO will happen, it could be 10 years before you can liquidate. And you might get screwed over on some dilution or the strike price or something currently undisclosed, private companies are notoriously secretive about their financials.
It's just too many unknowns. I don't think it makes sense to plan your life around hitting this options jackpot.
Attitudes like this is why I had to write a book about startups. In 2003, people said the same thing about Google. It turned out that yes, joining Google in 2003 had a very good chance of making you a millionaire, even if you weren't a star hire.
Guess what? Facebook is in the same situation Google was in 2003 today.
2 links: http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/05/compensation-thought-experi... http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/04/facebook-google-redux.html
It's the difference between your stock options being worth $0 (in the case of Google), and they being potentially worth 10X (in the case of Facebook). I'd say 10X is a pretty big difference.
$0? GOOG is at $624, I'm sure there are a lot of googlers sitting on options with $300-500 prices.
Considering the repricing [1] that occurred earlier this year, yes.
[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/announcing-googles-em...
This is from Jan 2009, not this year, and I'm sure you're aware of the fact that the downfall affected the whole economy, not Google in particular.
Oops. Memories fade. At any rate, my point is that a lot of people have options with a low strike price. I'm not sure what the downfall of the economy has to do with this fact.