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]".
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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]".