Please go ahead and name any other well-paying pre-IPO tech company which has regularly scheduled liquidity events for its employees as a matter of publicly stated company policy (rather than as random one-offs, which are already pretty rare).
What's that? There are none? You don't say!
A "healthy" secondary market there may be, but that does employees of most startups little good when selling their equity requires board approval, which 1) is a huge hassle, 2) is not even remotely guaranteed to be granted, and 3) there's no reliable way to figure out if you'll have that chance before you join and try it (at least a year later).
A Senior 1 offer from Cruise just went from 300k cash and 225k "equity" per year ("IPO plans? What IPO plans?") to 300k cash and 225k equity per year ("Yep, you can sell it every three months. Sure, we could roll this program back, but we'd probably lose 20% of our new hires within a month."). Good luck finding another startup that'll give you the same promise!
Not really related to the point I was trying to refute, but IMO there are two primary sources of difficulty when it comes to selling private equity as an employee:
1) regulations (imposing barriers & increasing friction as both first-order and second-order effects)
2) companies don't want it (i.e. for incentive alignment reasons, or other)
Regulations have a trivial solution, though obviously one that's not super popular.
Companies not wanting to allow employees to sell equity... well, there are probably some of those? My (mostly uninformed) speculation is that most companies past a couple hundred employees don't actually care, and to the extent that they do it's a mistake to try to lock employees in with golden handcuffs. Allowing the (relatively) free sale of equity before IPO increases the value of the equity, which makes their offers correspondingly more competitive; there are probably _some_ countervailing considerations but I think they're overwhelmingly dominated by potential employees going from "my modal outcome from this equity is 0" to "my modal outcome from this equity is [big number with large error bars, based on the current market price for the equity]".
If I'm looking for a new job in a specific pay range, the only way I can know whether a pre-IPO company's equity is liquid or not is if they explicitly say so, or if there's confirmation online (though obviously that's less reliable). If it's such a well-kept secret that there's not a single person talking about it on Blind, despite the many threads & posts about Canva (including by current employees) and their equity offerings, then it certainly isn't going to make my list.
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Please go ahead and name any other well-paying pre-IPO tech company which has regularly scheduled liquidity events for its employees as a matter of publicly stated company policy (rather than as random one-offs, which are already pretty rare).
What's that? There are none? You don't say!
A "healthy" secondary market there may be, but that does employees of most startups little good when selling their equity requires board approval, which 1) is a huge hassle, 2) is not even remotely guaranteed to be granted, and 3) there's no reliable way to figure out if you'll have that chance before you join and try it (at least a year later).
A Senior 1 offer from Cruise just went from 300k cash and 225k "equity" per year ("IPO plans? What IPO plans?") to 300k cash and 225k equity per year ("Yep, you can sell it every three months. Sure, we could roll this program back, but we'd probably lose 20% of our new hires within a month."). Good luck finding another startup that'll give you the same promise!
I mean, if you have a solution to that problem we should implement it.
Not really related to the point I was trying to refute, but IMO there are two primary sources of difficulty when it comes to selling private equity as an employee:
1) regulations (imposing barriers & increasing friction as both first-order and second-order effects)
2) companies don't want it (i.e. for incentive alignment reasons, or other)
Regulations have a trivial solution, though obviously one that's not super popular.
Companies not wanting to allow employees to sell equity... well, there are probably some of those? My (mostly uninformed) speculation is that most companies past a couple hundred employees don't actually care, and to the extent that they do it's a mistake to try to lock employees in with golden handcuffs. Allowing the (relatively) free sale of equity before IPO increases the value of the equity, which makes their offers correspondingly more competitive; there are probably _some_ countervailing considerations but I think they're overwhelmingly dominated by potential employees going from "my modal outcome from this equity is 0" to "my modal outcome from this equity is [big number with large error bars, based on the current market price for the equity]".
Canva. Do they shout about it publicly. No, I don't believe they do. Does that mean they are the only ones. Absolutely not.
If I'm looking for a new job in a specific pay range, the only way I can know whether a pre-IPO company's equity is liquid or not is if they explicitly say so, or if there's confirmation online (though obviously that's less reliable). If it's such a well-kept secret that there's not a single person talking about it on Blind, despite the many threads & posts about Canva (including by current employees) and their equity offerings, then it certainly isn't going to make my list.