Bull’s Eye: Negotiating the Right Job Offer

Mary Russell counsels individual employees and founders to negotiate, maximize and monetize their stock options and other startup stock. She is an attorney and the founder of Stock Option Counsel.

Boris Epstein is the founder of BINC Search, a next-generation recruiting startup that helps Silicon Valley companies hire technical talent at the scale they need.

You’re negotiating your salary and equity. You know there is a right answer – a bull’s eye where the final offer should land. But where is it?

The company is deciding what to offer you. They know there is a right answer, and they’ll get there using these four factors:

1.     Past Comp – your salary and equity in current and past jobs

2.     Peer Comp – the salary and equity of others in your peer group within this company

3.     Desired Comp – what you want to get paid, regardless of other indicators

4.     Market Comp – your competitive offers in the market

The right offer for you is the bull’s eye at the center of these possible offers. You can maximize your final offer by thoughtfully using these factors in your negotiation.

Past Comp

The company may ask you to disclose your compensation in your previous positions – your Past Comp.

If you disclose these numbers, be sure to include detail or “color” on the numbers to show the true value of your Past Comp. Do you believe your salary was lower than it should have been because of difficult financial circumstance at the company? Are you overdue for a review and raise? Does your company have valuable equity or a bonus structure that should be included to accurately describe your Past Comp? Are you expecting to continue vesting or receive additional stock option grants that you would forfeit by leaving your company?

A thoughtful discussion of your Past Comp may be more effective than following the lore that you should never disclose this information. You can use your answer to the question to guide the company to the right offer.

Peer Comp

The company also considers your Peer Comp – the range this company is already paying employees in similar positions. You start shaping this number during your interview as you discuss roles, levels and opportunities and present information to help the company understand where you fit to add the most value to the team.

For a company with a thoughtful system of leveling, there will be names or labels for each position and a range of salaries and equity packages they offer within each level. Your negotiation work is to distinguish yourself and show that you are a peer of those being paid at the highest end of the range for your level based on your unique skill set or experience.

The more unique your position, the less experience a startup will have in defining your Peer Comp. If you are a first-hire designer, physician or other leadership or expert role, you may have to help the company understand who your peers will be.  This is especially important in early-stage startups, where the hiring team might not understand that your new role should be considered a peer of, for example, vice presidents rather than junior engineers.

Desired Comp

The company also considers your Desired Comp – what you want to get paid. This is highly relevant to the right offer.

Desired Comp is especially important in equity packages, where your evaluation of the company’s equity may vary greatly from another candidate’s evaluation of that package. If you’ve been hoping for a home run exit during your career, you’ll be looking for an equity package that could get you there. If you’re strapped for cash and looking to maximize salary, you will have less desire for an equity-heavy final offer.   

There may be some tradeoffs, of course, but the right offer will be centered on your Desired Comp. So do your self-reflection homework and know what you want.

Market Comp

Companies take into account Market Comp and need to know what they will have to offer to stay competitive. While companies have a general idea of what is “market” for each position, your personal Market Comp is unique and driven by your efforts to identify alternative offers. The only way to use the right Market Comp in your negotiation is to go out to the market, derive that information and communicate it to the company.  

Once you have competitive offers, evaluate the equity packages and make thoughtful comparisons between them. For example, based on your appetite for risk and financial considerations, would you prefer options to purchase 1% of a Series A startup with a company valuation of $5 million or 5,000 RSUs of a public company with a current market price per share of $10? How many more stock options would the Series A startup have to offer you to equate to the public company offer? The company cannot make this estimation for you any more than they can decide which company is the best fit for your personality. When you own this process, you can confidently and effectively communicate to your company what is “market” for your equity offer.

Market Comp is also relevant after hire, as the startup job market can shift dramatically over time and new opportunities are always surfacing. As you continually find new information about opportunities, you can continually communicate with your company about what is “market” in defining the right salary and equity for your position. 

Bull’s Eye: The Right Offer

With thoughtful attention to these four factors, you can use your negotiation to guide the company to the bull’s eye – the right offer for you. If you see the company using the wrong data, you can bring the conversation back to the truth as you see it and work toward the right outcome. 

For more help on these preparations, you are welcome to read the full text of our interview here: The Right Offer – Long Form Q&A Between Stock Option Counsel and BINC Search

Mary Russell counsels individual employees and founders to negotiate, maximize and monetize their stock options and other startup stock. She is an attorney and the founder of Stock Option Counsel. You are invited to contact Stock Option Counsel for help in negotiating and evaluating your job offers, making stock option exercise and tax decisions and identifying your rights to sell startup stock. 

Boris Epstein is the founder of BINC Search, a next-generation recruiting startup that helps Silicon Valley companies hire technical talent at the scale they need.

VIDEO Startup Stock Options: Negotiate the Right Startup Stock Option Offer

Stock Option Counsel for individual employees and founders in all matters relating to startup stock options or other employee stock. This video describes stock options in a simple, accessible way. Call us when you want to evaluate, maximize or monetize your stock options or other startup stock. (650) 326-3412. www.stockoptioncounsel.com. info@stockoptioncounsel.com.

VIDEO Startup Stock Options: Startup Valuation

Stock Option Counsel for individual employees and founders in all matters relating to startup stock options or other employee stock. This video describes startup valuation for employees in a thoughtful, accessible way. Call us when you want to evaluate, maximize or monetize your stock options or other startup stock. (650) 326-3412. www.stockoptioncounsel.com. info@stockoptioncounsel.com.

VIDEO Startup Stock Options: Exercise Price Basics

Stock Option Counsel for individual employees and founders in all matters relating to startup stock options or other employee stock. This video describes stock options in a simple, accessible way. Call us when you want to evaluate, maximize or monetize your stock options or other startup stock. (650) 326-3412. www.stockoptioncounsel.com. info@stockoptioncounsel.com.

Negotiating Equity @ a Startup – Stock Option Counsel Tips

Negotiating an offer from a startup? Here's some tips. For more information on how Stock Option Counsel serves employees who are negotiating their offers, contact us or see our intro video here> . 

1. Know How Much Equity You Want

For employees early in their careers, the only negotiable terms for equity are the number of shares of stock and, possibly, the vesting schedule. The company will already have defined the form in which you will earn those shares, such as stock options, restricted stock units or restricted stock.

Your task in negotiating equity is to know how many shares would make the offer appealing to you or better than your other offers. If you don’t know what you want for equity, the company will be happy to tell you that you don’t want much.

Your desired number of shares should be the result of thoughtful consideration of the equity offer. There is no simple way to evaluate equity, but understanding the concepts and playing with the numbers should give you the power to decide how many shares you want.

One way to compare offers and evaluate equity is to find the current VC valuation of the preferred shares in the company. If a VC has recently paid $10 per share for the company’s stock, and you have been offered 10,000 shares, you can use $100,000 to compare to other offers. If another company has offered you 20,000 shares, and a VC has recently paid $5 for their shares, you could use those numbers to compare the offers.  For more info on finding VC valuations, see: Startup Valuation Basics or contact Stock Option Counsel. For more on early stage startups that do not have VC valuations, see this post. 

Remember that the purpose of this exercise is not to have a precise dollar value for the offer, but to answer these questions: How does this offer compare to other offers or my current position? What salary and number of shares at this company would make this a stable, sustainable relationship for me? In other words, will this keep me happy here for some time? If not, it is in nobody’s best interest to come to a deal on that package.

For more information on negotiating equity, see our video: Negotiate the Right Stock Option Offer or our blog with Boris Epstein of BINC Search: Negotiate the Right Job Offer.

2. Look for Tricky Legal Terms That Limit Your Shares' Value

There are some key legal terms that can diminish the value of your equity grant. Pay careful attention to these, as some are harsh enough that it makes sense to walk away from an equity offer.  

If you receive your specific equity grant documents before you are hired, such as the Equity Incentive Plan or Stock Option Plan, you can ask an attorney to read them.

If you don’t have the documents, you will have to wait until after you are hired to study the terms. But you can ask some general questions during the negotiation to flush out the tricky terms. For example, will the company have any repurchase rights or forfeiture rights for vested shares? Does the equity plan limit the kinds of exit events in which I can participate? What happens to my equity if I leave the company?

3.     Evaluate the Equity’s Potential

Evaluate the company to know how many shares would make the equity offer worth your time. You can start by asking the company some basic questions on their expectations for future growth and the exit timeline.

The higher your rank in the company and the stronger your emphasis on these matters, the more likely you are to speak to the CEO, CFO or someone else at the company who can answer these questions. If you want more resources to help you think like a startup investor, there are great online resources on valuation, dilution and exits for startups.

But don’t place too much weight on the company’s predictions of the equity’s potential value, especially if those values are based on an early-stage company’s Discounted Cash Flows (DCF). Even the experts know that the only thing early stage startups know about financial projections is that they are wrong.

Stock Option Counsel

Stock Option Counsel provides legal services for individual employees and founders in negotiating, evaluating and monetizing employee stock.

Employees rely on Stock Option Counsel in: (a) evaluation and negotiation of employee equity offers; (b) identifying unusual terms in equity documents; (c) legal matters for sales of shares to third parties; (d) negotiation of employment offers after acquisitions and (e) disputes regarding equity and payouts at exits.

Founders rely on Stock Option Counsel in: (a) protecting their personal interests at incorporation, financings and exits; (b) coaching for their VC negotiations by bringing them to mastery of financing and exit deal terms; (c) managing friction between co-founders; (d) negotiating employment offers after acquisitions and (e) disputes regarding equity and payouts at exits.

For more information on Stock Option Counsel, contact us or see our intro video here>

Stock Option Counsel Tip #1

Use @angellist to research "market" equity for your company size. https://angel.co/jobs   #equity #negotiation #startup

Exercising an Incentive Stock Option (ISO)? Should You Hold the Stock?

This is a guest post from Michael Gray CPA. He counsels individuals on their employee stock option tax questions. For more employee stock option tax resources, see Michael Gray, CPA's Option Alert at StockOptionAdvisors.com.  

When you have decided to exercise an incentive stock option (ISO) and consider the federal alternative minimum tax (AMT) and the net investment income tax, the benefits of holding stock after exercising an incentive stock option are reduced. The "brass ring" of having the gain from the sale of the stock eligible for long-term capital gains rates (15% or 20%) seems attractive, but the 28% alternative minimum tax rate applies
for the excess of the fair market value of the stock at exercise over the option price ("spread") when the option is exercised.  (California also has a 7% alternative minimum tax. Find out the rules for your state.)  The minimum tax credit for this tax "prepayment" is hard for many taxpayers to recover, because they are already subject to the AMT, due to deductions disallowed for the AMT computation, including state income taxes, real estate taxes and miscellaneous itemized deductions.  That means the "spread" at exercise is probably
going to be taxed at a 28% federal tax rate when the dust settles.

In addition, long-term capital gains are subject to the 3.8% net investment income tax when the taxpayer has high adjusted gross income.  That means the total federal tax rate for the initial spread would be 31.8%, versus a maximum federal tax rate of 39.6%.  Is an 8% tax benefit worth the risk of exposure to market volatility of the stock?  It could fall much more than that.

The main time it makes sense to hold the stock is when the "spread" is low and the option price is low.  Then you can probably afford to pay for the stock and AMT (if any) and to take the risk that the value of the stock could fall.  When you do this, you forgo the "time value premium" for the option.  If you have the alternative of just buying the stock for about the same price without exercising the option, you will probably be in a better position by doing that, because you will still have the options to exercise if the value of the stock increases with no downside risk for the options.

An alternative is to exercise the option and immediately sell the stock, provided the stock is publicly traded or there is a "liquidity event" such as a sale of the employer company.  In that case, the gain will be taxed as additional wages, subject to federal tax rates up to 39.6%, but exempt from employment
taxes such as social security and medicare taxes.

These are general comments.  You really should meet with a tax professional familiar with incentive stock options (that's our business!) to discuss your individual situation and have tax planning computations done.  To make an appointment with Michael Gray, call Dawn Siemer at (408)918-3162 on Mondays,
Wednesdays, Thursdays or Fridays.

This article was published in the September 24, 2014 Option Advisor Alert. Republished with permission. 

Founders: Kurt Vonnegut's Caution on Corporate Attorneys

Kurt Vonnegut, Author

If you are a founder with some suspicions about the motivations and allegiances of your company's law firm, you may appreciate the wisdom of Kurt Vonnegut.

Vonnegut has a great bit in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater about the worst motivations of corporate lawyers. 

The book is about money, sort of. Here's the opening line:

“A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

The Rosewater family had a great fortune. It was held by The Rosewater Foundation, for the benefit of the family's heirs, and managed by a law firm called McAllister, Robjent, Reed and McGee. An associate of the firm, Norman Mushari, was Vonnegut's embodiment of the worst motivations of corporate lawyers.

“No one ever went out to lunch with Mushari. He took nourishment alone in cheap cafeterias, and plotted the violent overthrow of the Rosewater Foundation. He knew no Rosewaters. What engaged his emotions was the fact that the Rosewater fortune was the largest single money package represented by McAllister, Robjent, Reed and McGee. He recalled what his favorite professor, Leonard Leech, once told him about getting ahead in law. Leech said that, just as a good airplane pilot should always be looking for places to land, so should a lawyer be looking for situations where large amounts of money were about to change hands.

”In every big transaction,” said Leech, “there is a magic moment during which a man has surrendered a treasure, and during which the man who is due to receive it has not yet done so. An alert lawyer will make that moment his own, possessing the treasure for a magic microsecond, taking a little of it, passing it on. If the man who is to receive the treasure is unused to wealth, has an inferiority complex and shapeless feelings of guilt, as most people do, the lawyer can often take as much as half the bundle, and still receive the recipient’s blubbering thanks.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Vonnegut's wisdom is a good reminder to founders that their company's attorneys may be representing the company's money rather than its founders.

Stock Option Counsel provides personal counsel to founders to protect their individual interests. At incorporation, we review the company counsel's documents and provide founder-friendly terms. At financings and mergers, we train founders to help them master the deal terms so they can identify and negotiate for the terms most favorable to them as individuals. For more information, see the  Stock Option Counsel website or call us at (650) 326-3412.

Best of Blogs: How to Value and Negotiate Startup Stock Options

We have suggested the following free resources to Stock Option Counsel clients to help them master this area and gain confidence in negotiating their stock options and other employee stock. We hope you find this list helpful and invite you to contact us to find out how Stock Option Counsel can help you evaluate and maximize your startup stock compensation. Contact>

1. David Weekly's  An Introduction to Stock & Options for the Tech Entrepreneur or Startup Employee

2. Venture Hacks' I have a job offer at a startup, am I getting a good deal?

3. Andy Payne's Startup Equity for Employees 

4. John Greathouse's What The Heck Are My Startup Stock Options Worth?! Seven Questions You Should Ask Before Joining A Startup

5. Wealthfront's Startup Salary and Equity Compensation Calculator (This is very general but people find it helpful.) And Wealthfront's The Right Way to Grant Equity to Your Employees.

6. Patrick McKenzie of Kalzumeus Software's Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued

7. Piaw Na's Negotiating Compensation, from An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups

8. mystockoptions.com's How does a private company decide on the size of a stock grant? (You may have to create a login)  

9. Michelle Wetzler's How I Negotiated My Startup Compensation

10. Mary Russell's Video Negotiate the Right Startup Stock Option Offer, based on Mary Russell and Boris Epstein's Bull's Eye: Negotiate the Right Job Offer

11. Robby Grossman's Negotiating Your Startup Job Offer

12. Mary Russell's Joining An Early Stage Startup? Negotiate Your Salary and Equity with Stock Option Counsel Tips

13. Mary Russell's RSUs: Startup Restricted Stock Units: What You Need to Know

Need more help? Stock Option Counsel provides legal services for employees, executives and independent contractors. Employees and executives rely on Stock Option Counsel's expert advice in their startup stock option matters to correct the imbalance of information and expertise in this area that can cause the uninformed to lose out on high value opportunities. We counsel clients during their compensation negotiations, their exercise choices and the sale of their shares. We also work with clients who are in disputes with employers or cofounders regarding their stock options, other equity compensation or intellectual property and help them resolve the issues in their favor.

Contact> us if you are interested in Stock Option Counsel. It works best to set up a 15 minute call so we can hear about your situation and describe how we would help as Stock Option Counsel. Alternatively, you can send us a message with your questions and we will respond and tell you how Stock Option Counsel could be valuable to you. Contact>

The One Percent: How 1% of Ruckus Wireless at Series A Became $1.7 million at IPO

Mary Russell counsels individual employees and founders to negotiate, maximize and monetize their stock options and other startup stock. She is an attorney and the founder of Stock Option Counsel. You are welcome to contact Stock Option Counsel at info@stockoptioncounsel or (650) 326-3412.

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