I signed an offer with Coinbase last week but won't actually start until late May due to the visa process. Looks like they're gonna IPO and go to the moon with their recent earnings report. My concern is that my $516k RSUs grant's share price will be determined after my start date. So I might end up with like 1000-2000 units depending on COIN's performance in the next month and a bit. Is it still worth joining when everyone who joined in the last few months is already making 1mil TC? I'm not sure how I feel about the pay disparity. Is it too late? Is there room to grind and get more equity when I'm there? Or should I just start interviewing again? Current TC: 220k Coinbase TC: 344k YoE: 5
Keep in mind coinbase probably won't grow at such a rapid pace forever... They are trading at like 100x sales already
The problem with coinbase is that it's solely reliant on crypto prices, which is not that stable to begin with, so long term it's difficult to predict what will happen
coinbase just made this week a substantial comp structure change that will benefit folks like you who signed previously (even if you start in May). Your new effective TC will be probably a little over 400k with this change. Given your current TC and yoe I think this is still worthwhile unless you have some other good pre ipo offer. And yes you will get more equity during annual refresh cycle (although with public price unfortunately). Paygap to pre ipo joiners will be still substantial unfortunately. DM me if you want more info.
Thanks for the details, ducktype. Can I DM you as well? I will be joining Coinbase towards the end of April
Duck type - did coinbase move to a fixed $ each year of equity, similar to Stripe?
Better strategy is to wait for the stock to tank and then join. Company’s revenue is highly tied to BTC volume
new comp structure is akin to stripe, i.e. annual grants with price at beginning of the year. Therefore really doesn't make sense to wait for stock / BTC tanking. Op has old offer which gives best of both worlds. Can't share too many details but ops TC should be higher than expected with this change. That said a real pre ipo offer/company might beat that long term
CB’s comp structure is more akin to traditional finance than Stripe’s. Stripe gives a dollar amount of equity vesting over 4 years. On the vest date the dollar amount is converted into Stripe RSUs based on the current FMV. This eliminates any potential upside of unvested equity. CB’s comp structure pays RSUs as a form of annual bonus (based on performance) vesting over 1 year. OP should delay start date as long as possible for crypto bull market to end and join at the nadir. Presumably the RSU share price of the OP’s grant will be the public share price on the date that he/she starts
Congrats Op, I’ve a coinbase interview coming up, can I Dm you for interview process?
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Coinbase went from $1.6B to $100B in valuation in 4 years as just a crypto exchange. We haven't even hit mainstream adoption, so there's still a lot of space for both Coinbase to grow and other startups to explode as well. Coinbase is a safe choice, but like you said, you'll be around a bunch of millionaires. You can always join and be on the lookout for other rising pre-IPO crypto companies to jump to. Also, you don't need to only look at corporations. There's a huge need for talent in the protocol level as well. Think Compound, Uniswap, etc.