🍕Startup Compensation
Key takeaways
What is wrong with stock compensation for startup employees?
Employees don’t receive enough stock.
Often an employee cannot afford to exercise and pay taxes on their options when they decide to leave.
Sometimes employee options get unfavorable tax treatment.
Employees usually lack the necessary information about stock or options.
What are proposed solutions to fix this problem?
Provide more stock for employees. Given the value employees add over many years, startups should make an effort to reward them with a larger option pool. The issue is that founders are reluctant to dilute their equity holding resulting to a short sighted stinginess.
Give options that are exercisable for 10 years from the grant date. This would replace the current system which most employees have 90 days post leaving their job to exercise their options.
Do a better job of helping employees think about the value of their options. The bare minimum of any startup should be telling a candidate what percentage of the company the equity grant represents. On the employee side, a specific question worth asking is a version of “so if I have 0.5% of company and it gets acquired tomorrow for $100 million dollars, will I get $500,000?”. This will give a good pulse check on liquidation preferences.
Sources:
🇵🇱Poland
Key takeaways
Poland could become the most powerful country in Europe as Russia botching their invasion of Ukraine creates a rare opportunity.
The reason being that Russia is in a mess. They are facing a mass exodus of Russians from the country, they have some of the worst demographics, their economy is increasingly isolated from the rest of the world, and they are a technologically unsophisticated country.
As Russia decline, Poland could rise. As a result of the war, Poland received ~1.5 million Ukrainian refugees. Additionally, the migrants are “overwhelmingly young, educated mothers with children.”
Poland could benefit from a demographic dividend that could propel a generation of better than expected growth.
Also, when Ukraine needs to be rebuilt once the war is over, Polish companies are well positioned to help considering their proximity to each other.
Sources:
Poland Rising in Central Europe by Jacob Shapiro
If you would like to have a chat about anything above, send me a DM on LinkedIn.
Thanks for reading!
jjkol💫