Boy this article is a very friendly interpretation of Scott Kupor's blog post.
From NYTimes:
> He [Scott Kupor] also suggests a longer period for employees to exercise options after they leave, up to 10 years. That figure is endorsed by Y Combinator in an argument that any lesser period is unfair to employees.
Makes it seem like Scott Kupor is on the leading edge of caring about employees, in agreement with YC (which has actually been employee friendly in words and actions in regard to stock options).
However, read Scott's actual blog post and he refers to the 10 year exercise idea incredulously:
> The 10-year “solution” thus takes money/option value out of the pockets of the current (and growing) employee base to line the pockets of former employees who are no longer contributing to the business.
> Talk about disenfranchising your remaining employees and not being able to attract new ones.
Good reminder to always read your primary sources.
Indeed it is. I particularly like the 'no longer contributing to the business' part, as if the work done by the original employees isn't what the current business was built on, at a discounted rate if their stock options are worthless. And as if the stock options were the only reason they're having trouble attracting quality talent.
Stock options seem attractive as a form of compensation, since the hope is that you're working for a unicorn and one day you'll be fabulously rich, but the cash equivalent is better more often than not. It's just a form of risk transfer from those who have plenty to those who hope to have plenty by dint of talent and hard work. Having been burnt, I won't do it again.
Indeed. Other people no longer contributing to the business include the VC's and angel investors by the same logic.
Either the former employees were paid full market rate salaries during their employment, in which case the company colossally fucked up by giving shares to them for literally no reason, or those former employees made a capital contribution just like any other investor.
Exactly. Plus the phrasing of the criticism is so odd: "no longer contributing to the business." Let's all accept that as true, so allowing original employees' to purchase for a longer time period simply preserves their ability to be rewarded for their work. That's a good thing, not a bad thing. Plus, the dilution argument is pretty weak: the employee pool is usually 10-20%. So investors get diluted by 10%. Whoopee.
I actually disagree with the 10yr time frame (although will admit it has its merits), but also agree with some of your logic. I just think that the 10yr "fix" solves some problems and creates others. I think this issue is that you should:
A) not rob former employees of accrued stock value
B) probably try to somewhat reduce incentives to leave if the company is going to continue to do well
There are a few problems I see here:
1) stock option grants are completely arbitrary and sometimes end up very wrong
2) it's hard to fix that in the future because you'll end up at a higher strike price
3) end up being expensive and tax inefficient to exercise
The closest I've seen to people who seem to get this and have sensible solutions are Andrew Mason at Detour (progressive equity) and Dustin Moskovitz at Asana (larger grants, but back loaded into years 4-6).
I have great respect for Adam D'Angelo at Quora for suggesting a solution to the problem, have known him in school he's certainly smarter than me on almost every axis of intelligence, but I think there are other potentially creative solutions that might be better (although I don't know tax compliance).
For example I think you could keep the status quo, but offer the option for employees to exchange their options for shares (white meat) at the time they can exercise. Example you have options for 100 shares at a strike price of $50, at the time you leave the shares are worth $100, instead of having to come up with $5000, you just get $50 shares free and clear. I think there's still a tax hit issue, but at least it's not doubled with paying for the shares.
All of these things should be taxed as ordinary income. Companies shouldn't be able to do an end-run around taxation by giving you valuable stuff instead of giving you money directly.
> And tying an individual's future (health insurance, retirement, immigration status) to an employer is a bad thing.
Retirement isn't really 'tied to an employer', in that you can still open an IRA without an employer[0], or use a non-tax-advantaged account for retirement savings (most people outside the military or government service use non-tax-advantaged accounts for at least a portion of their retirement, since the IRA and 401(k) contribution limits are too low for most people to survive on during retirement).
This might have been different 50 years ago, where employer-driven pensions were more common, but today, the only real way your employer impacts your retirement is the 401(k).
The purpose of both the IRA and the 401(k) is to provide people with an extra incentive to plan for retirement. Putting away $450/month towards your retirement[1] can be unpleasant, but if you're getting, say, $90 that back (in the form of lower tax withholdings/taxes due), it makes it a bit easier, because that's effectively only $360 out-of-pocket.
The incentives work similarly for the 401(k), except the tax savings work out for the employer as well, meaning that they are incentivized to give you some portion of your compensation in the form of 401(k) matching (ie, they have an extra incentive to nudge you towards saving more of your own money for retirement).
Personally, I do believe that, if you do not have access to a 401(k) through an employer, your IRA contribution limit should be raised by $17,000 (which is the 401(k) contribution limit for individual contributions). But without employer contributions, at most that's saving you less than $6,000 - and that's if you're already at the very top marginal tax brackets (even making $100K gross in NYC, the most heavily taxed jurisdiction in the country, won't be taxed at 35%).
[0] Well, you can't contribute more than your total annual income to an IRA, but if you're making less than $450/month and living in the US, retirement planning is not your most immediate problem.
[1] ie, enough to max out your IRA contribution limit
It's not giving shares, it's a share exchange. Again I'm not an expert, but I've seen these types of arrangements before and somehow they got reasonable tax treatment because they were spelled out as such in the original grant (so nothing had actually "changed" at the time).
Kupor's mentality stems from dealing with co-founders who leave right after they complete their 4 year vest, well before IPO/acquisition.[1] While they certainly laid a foundation for the company, there's a lot of work still to be done to get to a liquidity event. Is it fair for them to leave with a huge stake and let the other co-founder(s) and employees figure it out? This is where he gets to phrases like "no longer contributing" or "wealth transfer". Essentially he's saying the vesting schedule doesn't capture everything an option should incentivize.
Having said that, I think he's over-applied this mentality to regular employees with much smaller stakes. It is reasonable to expect a founder to stay 10 years with a company. Not most employees.
If that's the case, is it fair for founders and VCs to take such a huge stake, considering all of the actual work is done by the other people who work there?
Palantir was founded 11 years ago, which shows there's nothing magic about the proposed 10-year exercise period. You might still be waiting for your unicorn to provide an exit (which will feel increasingly mythical, like its namesake).
This sounds like a company in big trouble and trying desperately to stem attrition and improve tanking morale.
According to crunchbase they're basically owned by a private equity firm now (which is rarely a fun place to be) and are raising something like a billion dollars a year -- which basically appears to be around what their operating costs are (employee count of that year * $250k/yr).
They're either not bringing in any real revenue, or growing at the rate of revenue. Multiple raises per year (of weirdly different values) indicate frequent requests for more money.
Are they growing or are they dying? Either way they aren't doing it through revenue, and they're not going public so the financials stay very hidden.
Anybody who thinks this offer is meant to benefit employees isn't looking much beyond the surface. The fact that it includes a release of claims, a noncompete clause, and an NDA is a solid clue that this move is intended to benefit Palantir and not employees.
That's all standard stuff. If I was at a company for 11 years, I'd sure as hell want to cash out. Whether their offer is a good price or not, who knows.
If you can liquidate $500,000 worth of shares, that means you still have at least $3,500,000 worth of shares in a company that has no plans to ever go public.
I am not a lawyer, but it's possible the non-compete is enforceable in California in this case.
When an employee gets something "in kind" for the non-compete agreement, which arguably this is, then it may be upheld. For example, if a company pays you non-salary money in exchange for a non-compete agreement, then it may be upheld. Consider the case of former HP CEO Mark Hurd when he went to Oracle.
What's not enforceable in CA are non-competes in, for example, normal employment contracts that apply to everyone.
Edit: To be clear, Mark Hurd was allowed to work at Oracle, but he had to give the money back he got for signing the agreement.
It's a pretty crappy deal. It was only accepted because otherwise these people would be sitting on worthless shares, waiting for an exit/IPO that doesn't look like it's coming anytime soon.
They are not "basically owned" by a private equity firm. They have raised money at high valuations, and I strongly doubt that they have sold away a controlling stake in the company. So, they still get to make their own decisions.
They are definitely bringing in real revenue. Many firms have raised substantially more than they need to, because they have been well aware that funding could dry up.
They've raised more money under private equity than all the rest of the rounds combined x 5. The last round, by a private equity firm, was almost the size of all other raises combined.
They've raised 15 rounds that are publicly known. Every single raise since Sep 2013 has been under private equity. This sounds more like the company is being sold on the private market and each new owner is putting in a year's worth of cash infusion for operating costs.
Are those fund raising rounds? I dunno. But it's one of the weirdest fund raising profiles I've ever seen.
Comments on this thread are not very interesting and generally off topic. This article points out an issue in SV which is that it's hard for employees to get value out of options held in companies that do not go public.
One reason for this not mentioned in the article is that in the US the tax burden is extreme - partially because when it was implemented it expected companies to go public.
If you hold options in a private company you get taxed on the exercise of those options based on the fair market spread which is the difference in price between your original strike price (the price of the options when they were granted to you) and the current fair market valuation. This is taxed as income.
This is problematic since once exercised you're holding shares of an illiquid asset (since the company is not public) and they're difficult to sell. This means even if you save up enough money to exercise your options you'll get hit with a potentially enormous tax bill due that year that you can't easily sell your newly exercised options to pay for. Additionally when you sell the actual shares after you've exercised them you get taxed again on the sale.
The one exception to this is if your options are ISOs (incentive stock options) then the delta between the strike price and the fair market value isn't taxed immediately, but it does count towards AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) and it's fairly easy to hit the AMT while exercising options (meaning you could only exercise a tiny amount per year tax free).
All of these things make it extremely difficult to realize any value in a private company without enormous amounts of upfront cash and also losing roughly half to taxes. It also makes it extremely difficult to exercise options outside of a liquidity event. This can also make it hard to leave a company since the agreements are often 90 days to exercise after leaving or you lose your options (there's also usually a ten year expiration date).
If companies in SV intend to stay private and don't want their employees to view the options as impossible to liquidate we'll probably see an uptick in liquidity events like this one. The companies that value their employees will probably figure out a way to make this work.
It's worth noting that most startups nowadays also include a non-transference clause in the options contract. This forbids any private sale of shares outside of a liquidity event. This is terrible for an employee leaving a company. Not only is the employee on the hook for a big tax bill if he exercises, but he can't even sell any of his shares to cover the cost.
AFAIK, this is a response to Facebook employees selling equity on private markets.
Yeah, the ISO spread with the AMT is bullshit that basically keeps the plebes in their place by not actually letting them get any windfall. However it seems like the real problem is exercising post-IPO. In the post-IPO world, you're dealing with say a 5x to 10x spread, possibly even more. In the pre-IPO world, your spread is probably 2x at most, which is much more manageable.
One clarification with what you said, is that with the AMT ISO exercise is that you're not actually taxed on both the exercise and the sell. What's actually going on is that you're prepaying your taxes when you sell the stock. When you sell the shares, you'll only have to pay the taxes (either regular income or capital gains) based on the difference of the fair market value of the stock when exercised and when sold. If it went up, and you sold in less than year from exercise or less than 2 years from ISO grant, then it's regular income, otherwise it's capital gains. So you could actually get a tax refund when you sell. (Same is true if the market price actually declined between exercise and sell.)
The argument is that when you exercise, you received something of value for less than market and so you made money, but in reality you actually haven't realized any gains, and actually are at cash loss. I understand the argument, but I don't agree with it, because you did not actually realize any gain.
FWIW, San Jose's congresswoman Zoe Lofgren has repeatedly tried to fix the AMT and ISO taxation, but hasn't had much success.[0]
Where I disagree with you is thinking that private companies are going to "figure out a way to make this work" in a way that's beneficial for workers. I'm sorry, but I've never seen high finance work out for workers. It's basically a play for the financially desperate. It's no better than selling you shares on sharespost or something. If it's illiquid market, you're never going to get full value, and you know damn well those that are buying are going to expect a few multiples in gain. They can just wait a bit longer. Workers on the other hand, are busy trying to scrape together a down payment on a $2,000,000 shack in the valley.
Thanks for the clarification about post exercise selling of shares (that you're taxed on the difference between exercise price and sale price).
I agree the argument that you make money on exercise doesn't make sense - especially since the company could easily crash afterwards and you can still get stuck with a huge tax bill for value you never actually realized (except on paper).
Agreed you won't get full value, but I think the existence of liquidity events like this one is an example of private companies "figuring out a way to make this work". They're letting employees realize some value from their equity.
Nothing can be done about the 2 million dollar shack in the valley though (unfortunately).
One other option sometimes available that I didn't mention is filing an 83b election with the IRS and exercising options early before they've vested and before there's a fair market spread. You can avoid taxes this way, but you're putting money at risk very early and often you're not able to do this anyway (there are rules about early exercise).
I don't care to nit pick but it's not quite that simple. The AMT credit you receive at exercise can in theory be used to offset the tax due at sale, but you can only claim amt credit if your traditional tax liability is higher than your amt liability that year. While that may be true if you sell a lot of stock it's not a lock esp in California where a working married couple with a home can have a lot of high dollar deductions. In that case you keep the credits until you can use them.
Amen I remember that when I had shares in o2 from a employee scheme. The company did an exercise in buying out small shareholders for around 50p - Less than a year later the sahres got brought by telephonica for £2.0
Yes it's a capital loss. Which means you can use it to offset an unlimited amount of capital gains, but only 3k of ordinary income. So how long it takes to redeem could be a long time if you never incur capital gains.
The notion of "realizing" seems like nonsense to me. You get given a piece of paper worth $100, you should get taxed for $100. Whether that piece of paper is a federal reserve note or a stock certificate should be an irrelevance, no?
If you exercise shares in a dark market why don't you just mark them at zero? If they aren't trading you can just make up the price and that goes for any good not just shares of companies.
Just because a company isn't public doesn't make it a 'dark market' (not sure what that is).
The 409A valuations are real and there are rules surrounding how exercise happens. You can't just sell them outside of that and not pay taxes. You could theoretically sell the shares once exercised to some other private investor if you can find one, but you'd still have to follow the same exercise rules.
Feels like there should be some kind of "shotgun clause" equivalent. The government wants to value your illiquid asset at $x for tax purposes? Fine, but if you disagree with that valuation you get a corresponding right to sell that asset to the government for 90% of $x and make it their problem.
They could buy and hold - the government has a long time horizon. Or they could auction it off. They could abstain from votes, or they could do something more complicated.
Palantir's official reason of "improving employee moral" doesn't seem to really mesh with the conditions they are imposing on the buy-back:
> [...] employees who sell their shares agree agree that they will not compete with Palantir for 12 months or solicit any Palantir employees during that time [...] [and] agree to a nondisclosure arrangement that forbids them from even talking about the repurchase and waive any claims they might have against the company.
The nyt put forwards a reasonable idea that this is a mechanism to increase their perceived value, and I'm inclined to agree.
EDIT: the buzzfeed article [1] paints an even worse picture:
> If they [employees] get any inquiries about Palantir from reporters, the contract says, they must immediately notify Palantir and then email the company a copy of the inquiry within three business days.
Given that the buyback price is above market price, I don't see a problem with this. Palantir is compensating you for signing a noncompete/NDA. If you don't want to sign those things, you are free to sell on the private markets for less than what Palantir offers you.
> you are free to sell on the private markets for less than what Palantir offers you
Perhaps you are more aware of the terms on those shares than the rest of us, but generally you aren't quite "free" to sell the shares on the private market.
Many have, but the way the stock agreements are structured, it effectively gives them a pocket veto on stock sales, which impacts the value that an employee can get for them.
If Palantir is a CA business entity (I didn't check, maybe it's a DE corp), its noncompete should be per se invalid (= automatically void) in CA. There are only a few circumstances in which noncompetition agreements are valid in CA, and this doesn't seem to be one of them. See section 2.1.2 in:
This is one of the exceptions to noncompetes in California - when you sell your interest in a company. They are a Delaware corp. They have tons of employees outside of California (New York?).
Actually, I think you have to be selling the whole business - but from my comment above - it's not part of the employment agreement, so ... it's possibly enforceable. Maybe not, but I wouldn't count on it either way.
A non-compete clause in an employment agreement isn't valid. I think it's arguable for a stock option agreement. At that point it's not a one-sided agreement. The employee is gaining something in exchange for their non-compete, and can opt out if they want.
I would bet they don't apply that to existing employees, but they'll give it a shot on anyone hired since the change.
If this turns into a trend, it will mean a very interesting change to silicon valley culture. I read a blog post a couple of days ago that the average tenure for a software engineer at a medium to large company in SV was 1.5 to 2 years. With an effective way to push non-compete agreements on employees, that would be... significant. It would take a lot of companies doing it at once, though. Otherwise everyone would simply avoid the handful of firms that did it. After looking at this summary, I wouldn't work for Palantir. If I did, I'd have to consider the stock completely valueless.
> It also makes them agree to a nondisclosure arrangement that forbids them from even talking about the repurchase and waive any claims they might have against the company. And the offer extends to some but not all former employees.
This is called a PLP (Private Liquidity Plan). The comments here are kind of vaguely negative but it's actually not a bad deal for employees. The main problem is that most pre-IPO companies can't afford it. It uses up capital that would otherwise go into operations.[1]
Where it may make sense is in so-called "private IPOs", i.e. those 9 or 10 digit dollar rounds. There's enough money there to hand out. In olden days, companies would have been public by then and employees would have had liquidity. Planatir raised $880M last year so, yeah, they can afford it.[2]
Wouldnt it be nice to have coworkers (ish, they both have positions at Berkeley) who can write willfully ignorant reinterpretations of your terrible ideas in the Times?
Edit: I don't know for a fact that they are coworkers in a meaningful sense, of course a university is a large place, but I would expect a professor of law to have better reading comprehension than was on display here.
I could easily see the situation evolving that "unicorns" would either have to provide liquidity for options or pay over market rates. An engineer at FB or Google that getting paid in Restricted Stock units in addition to their salary sees it as "extra pay" and an employee who sees a company that will never let them sell options as not a smart place to work.
It does open up some creative financing though. Imagine a "common only" startup, one where every share bought by investors or earned as an option had the same rights and liquidation preference. Or my favorite[1] starting a company with a fixed 5 billion shares all at a par value of $1 each. Then only pay your employee in shares, only get investments by selling shares to investors.
[1] I call it a favorite since we joked at a party once that if you did this, and convinced a friend to buy a hundred shares for $100 you could call yourself a self made billionaire! And be completely truthful.
> Mr. Kupor notes that extending the exercise time for former employees makes their options more valuable at the expense of employees and investors. (It does so because former employees have a longer time to exercise their options and dilute the other shareholders.)
This is simply a falsehood. Exercises of options of do not dilute shareholders -- new issuances do. Former employees do not issue new shares.
It's not an outright falsehood. He's referring to the (correct, but also insidious) fact that compared to a 90-day exercise window, more people will end up exercising under a more extended window - and this will dilute. In other words, extended windows reduce the number of options returned to the pool, and are thus slightly dilutive.
So the dilution does not come from the exercise period; it comes from rank and file employees being unable to raise the required capital to exercise. So imagine if Kupor had said "We should not be paying employees any salaries; that puts cash in their pockets which enables them to exercise their options when they vest which leads to dilution for every investor" - that would have been an obviously ridiculous position. So is the statement OP is commenting on.
On a side note, you have been defending Kupor in the other thread too with such nitpicks. Why?
My hunch is that the majority of revenue was forward looking with foreign governments and large clients. This revenue was used as the basis for raising at extremely high valuations. Investor diligence was weak and the exact terms of these contracts was likely not understood in detail. When shit hit the fan with the software/consulting services and the value was not realized (and or budgets were cut, key champions retired etc.) ... contracts got cancelled. When contracts got cancelled the house of cards started to fall. The issue with huge contracts is that it's very easy to lose them. This is why a broad revenue base is crucial.
Now they know that hundreds of employees are going to go blow the whistle so they have to pay them off with buybacks while they figure out an exit strategy.
What nobody talks about is the very good reason why employers give only 90 days after leaving a company to exercise options is that there is also a tax liability to the company for an employee exercising an option. Usually employer has to pay employment tax, now if you have a lot of options still unexercised from former employees and your stock has appreciated a lot the company can be on the hook for a lot of taxes. The company prefers only being on the hook for current employees.
The true solution is to give stock options that can be exercised early as long as the value of the stock is very low such that an employee's hiring bonus after tax could cover the cost. There is no tax owed by the employee since he purchased shares with no gain and then you vest outright stock. Once the stock value goes up it would be best to grant RSUs of convertible notes that convert into stock.
I can't find the source so this is from memory; but Karp or Theil said they wouldn't ever go public and essentially can't because they are essentially a DoD contractor. While other companies notably do similar things and other contractors are public, Palantir provides a unique platform to some extent and their customer base, much of their technology and operations are secret.
It is known they will not likely go public as it would be detrimental to their business and in-Q-tel (cia vc arm) is a major shareholder. While Silicon Valley does need to rethink some of the ways they compensate employees; especially at late stage private ones, I would not consider Palantir indiicative of a typical SV unicorn
* left after he "had successfully replaced myself in both parts of the company we'd created and had fully vested".
So I am not going to speculate whether he was pushed out, but it sounds like he has much less latitude for steering the company. Especially when you consider the power of the other founders and the initial VC capital that was put in. So this (claims of palantir going public) are what I would expect a major shareholder without control of the company to say. It is effectively the only way to put pressure on them.
Even if this is wildly incorrect, and it quite possibly is, that comment was made several years after he had little more than an advisory role at palantir.
After seeing that name for probably half a dozen years, today for the first time I realized it's probably intended to be a cute mashup of the words "incubate" and "intel"
BAE,BT and qinetiq are quoted and do work for the MOD and DOD - if its such sensitive work then they would be crown servants (or what ever the equivalent is for the USA)
Yes, it's an offer. I don't see why everyone is so up-in-arms over an offer. People can reject offers just like they can make them. Other similar offers include employment offers. I'm going to comment more generally on this issue between founder and employee deals:
Here's what I think. HN is mostly of the employee class and so there's a politicized negative sentiment about companies not leaning the way of the employees.
Or maybe people think these offers and deals are bad for both the company founders and the employees. So here is my proposition if you believe that. Start your own company and enact whichever agreements you think are best. Do what Palantir does, or what YC advises, or whatever you make up. Give a 20 year exercise period if you want. Your call.
But you have to actually found a company.
I find it hard to believe in a moral "good and bad" on this issue. We're just talking about deals and contracts between people. And if people act with agency with regards to accepting and declining offers, and inventive individuals can come up with new systems and agreements that work better for everyone, then it will be fine. A moral bad would be something like Google and Apple and Facebook colluding behind closed doors to keep engineer pay below a certain threshold.
For the employees who will have to negotiate: you can't get a deal that's good for you if you aren't prepared to walk.
How does the non compete and soliciting work for ex-employees. Is it 12 month after they left (likely void/expired for some already) or 12 month after signing in which case some ex-employees probably can't even sign this.
Either way I'm very skeptical of anything involving NDAs or non competes. I can understand a non poaching clause (but am also opposed to that on ideological grounds). If I could afford it I wouldn't sign anything that has NDAs or non disclosure.
I also doubt that many of the ex-employees need liquidity as they are likely to hold well paying jobs. I suppose some could need it but those are probably exactly the people least likely to compete with Palantir.
Exercising options in a non-public company should not be taxed or valued in any way until the stock can be sold in a public market or to a purchasing entity. Of course what are the odds Congress would ever do that? Nil.
H.R. 4351 also includes an Incentive Stock Option (ISO)
provision that corrects a severe inequity in the AMT tax
system and finally resolves the ongoing AMT Incentive Stock
Option crisis. This essential provision provides relief for
hard working Americans who are treated unjustly by the tax
burden caused when exercising their Incentive Stock Options.
Under this important provision, employees will pay a fair and
proportional tax on money actually made and will be relieved
of the impossible burden of ongoing liability to pay taxes on
income never received. This provision will help ensure that our
companies continue attracting the best and brightest with
competitive compensation packages.
Can't this be mitigated to a large degree by setting the value per share to an tiny fraction of a dollar? Sure, you'll have a tax to pay when the shares are granted, but it should be reasonable.
I could get behind the scheme you commented with, but I'm unsure of generally why we have the system we currently do, so I would want to understand the rationale for the status quo.
It probably has something to do with preventing creative ways of liquidating illiquid assets, such as borrowing against the assets and promptly defaulting.
In my understanding, there's huge tax penalties, both to employer and employee, for giving employees in the money options. Thus options have to be granted with a strike that is fmv or something approximating it. Excessively sandbagging the valuation would, I think, be consider doing the above.
Further, you don't think businesses are averse to golden handcuffs, do you?
There is an easier solution. Go public. I've gotten options in a private company, RSUs in a private company that got acquired, options in a public company, and RSUs in a public company.
The only thing that I would count on an offer in the future are RSUs in a public company.
Yeah, CMU grad here. My impression of Palantir is that they hire the top 1% of developers and pay them what a 50 percentile developer would make.
If you ever get a palantir job offer, you'd be better off just forwarding it to Uber, or Google or FB, and waiting for them to give you a 50% increased counteroffer on the spot.
Curious what your estimate of a 50th and a 99th percentile developer salary is for a new grad? And do you mean a 50th percentile CMU grad, or a 50th percentile CMU grad developer, or just overall?
Perhaps I exaggerate with the 99 percentile number, but the people I know who work at a top(high paying) company like Uber or Jane Street will get something like 150k easy (and maybe a signing bonus), and Palantir is more middle of the road with 100k base salary or less, and stock options of dubious value.
Are you saying 150k salaries for new grads or total comp?
ASAIK, Goog/Uber/FB starting salaries are closer to 110k base with $40-50k RSUs vesting per year (refreshes each year), performance bonus 10-15% salary and sometimes a generous signing bonus.
Well yeah, you should be incredibly smart to trick the smartest graduates in the country to dedicate their lives to your so called "mission" :P. You should read some of the answers from their Director of Engineering, so incredibly cheesy.
From NYTimes:
> He [Scott Kupor] also suggests a longer period for employees to exercise options after they leave, up to 10 years. That figure is endorsed by Y Combinator in an argument that any lesser period is unfair to employees.
Makes it seem like Scott Kupor is on the leading edge of caring about employees, in agreement with YC (which has actually been employee friendly in words and actions in regard to stock options).
However, read Scott's actual blog post and he refers to the 10 year exercise idea incredulously:
> The 10-year “solution” thus takes money/option value out of the pockets of the current (and growing) employee base to line the pockets of former employees who are no longer contributing to the business.
> Talk about disenfranchising your remaining employees and not being able to attract new ones.
Good reminder to always read your primary sources.