Successfully got an offer from a series B startup in SF. I haven't received any detail yet. I'd like to be prepared to discuss the offer and I have absolutely no idea what are reasonable expectations regarding equity, sign-on bonus and annual bonus. Title: senior manager (business/finance) Company: raised series B this year bringing valuation to >$1B Location: SF #seriesB #equity
In this market there is no diff between public company comp and promised start up stock. So why take risk ?
Explain please, why are they similar
95% of startups go belly up or firesale 4% make some decent exit 1% become hit If you get into FAANGMULA you can beat returns from 4% of startups. In addition series B means dilution already happened. Unless the startup is working on a huge problem thats scalable at global scale (ABNB, UBer) its not worth I wasted my time from 2010-2015 in two start ups. Burned out. One had decent exit. But cumulative numbers does not match even what Cisco offers
I don’t think sign-on/annual bonuses are typical for Series B startups. You can prob expect ~0.04% equity.
google it
Adding some extra information. Base: $180k Bonus: 15% Equity: 0.025% Sign-on: possibly YOE: 8
Is equity offered in form of options or rsu ?
i’ve done some research this morning. these early stage unicorns are touching 100x ARR in their valuations. i’d stay away. it’s easy enough to do the math. .025% is worth just 250,000 (4 years). way too risky in my book. how much upside could their possibly be?
I think that’s fair. The company however is already profitable and are “considering” and IPO in the next couple of years. Does that reduce the risk enough you think? (I know nothing about the startup world or even tech really if I’m being honest).
already profitable sounds good on paper. for most startups at typical valuations it’s death. it means you aren’t spending fast enough. for these 100x companies i imagine its different. perhaps it’s hard to NOT take profit. i imagine it does reduce risk. but this is an unfamiliar area for me. lime was apparently such a unicorn. they lost 80% of their value. but look at their business completely indefensible. they were in a different model. so it’s going to be impossible to say anything in general. give us some specifics.
@op did you end up taking the job?
Umm they are unlikely to give you good bonuses. All discretionary. Your best bet is to negotiate percentage of they company in equity. Cash can be a serious limitation