Startup Offer
Location San Jose Company: Series A (Backed by Softbank Ventures Asia, Vertex ventures & Big Basin Capital) Total Funding: 13M (CEO has invested 4M of his own money) Approx 5M in annual revenue Company is in Data Science as Service(DSaaS) space. Offer: 165k base 30k/4 stock options @25c. 1 year cliff with monthly vesting starting at month 13. CEO said they are working to get strike-price lowered & approved by board(not sure if that can happen) They have either yearly refresher or bonus No sign on YoE: 7 If I join, I will be employee number 32. I asked them what %age of the company does 30k options correspond to but they didnt answer that. They jut said company is valued at ~45-50MM. I do not have any competing offers yet & since I am at a no-name company, I am not sure how much leverage do I have for negotiation. Offered base(165k) is ~20% above my current base. Please help evaluate.
Where do you think company will be in 3-4 years from now? What is portfolio of CEO?
CEO had sold 2 startups prior to this one and had worked at SAP for 13yrs. They said they r expanding fast. CTO is the creator of Apache Zeppelin notebook. They have good pedigree I believe. Since DSaaS is kinda hot I m assuming they may succeed but not very confident.
Thatโs a positive sign and I am pretty sure they would sell this as well. However, seems like a candidate for acquisition where you as an employee would not make much. At 200M exit you are looking for your options to be worth a few hundred thousand max. Do leetcode and go to FAANG or others that pay well.
Offer is subpar
Not getting a clear picture of ownership stake this early on can be a bit of a red flag. All employees should have transparency into the cap table at 30-some employees.