How hard is it to negotiate compensation with a public company when another offer is from a company that's hasn't IPOed yet (even if very mature and clearly on the path)? MSFT wouldn't budge even when my stock comp from a pre-IPO company was quite significant. In fact, base, bonus, and stock were all higher.Is this common across the board? Cheers
Pre-announced IPO paper is worthless in negotiations unless there are routine liquidity events.
If you’re willing to take the other offer you have a ton of leverage since you have them in a lose scenario. If you’re not willing to take the offer with paper money then they probably also know that offer isn’t as good as theirs. TL;DR: if you’re not willing to accept your other offer then it’s not a good leverage.
I was definitely willing to take it - it was a total 50/50 toss up. The positives for Msft were the tech stack and brand name which would open more doors than the other. I was in the team matching stage with google but had already delayed so long with these companies and just had to pick