Rethinking Equity Compensation: From Lottery Ticket to Financial Wedge

To benchmark offers, companies currently pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for manually collected annual compensation data; this data is immediately stale and often difficult for companies to put in their own context. Employees and candidates suffer, too. They are often left in the dark about how to interpret and value the equity portion of thei... See more

Ownership, via employee stock option plans, has been a powerful tool for incentivizing talented people to dedicate their skills to building startups in Silicon Valley. While this model has been extremely successful, it hasn’t been accessible to all, constrained by geography and legacy financial infrastructure, among other factors. One result is tha... See more

Today, it is hard not to notice the prevalence of equity culture. Every employee optimizes their stocks and options. People frequently move between companies to build a portfolio of equities. Employees of successful startups want to become angel investors. Second-year MBAs want to be founders or VCs. Nobody wants to miss out on the next equity succ... See more