I wouldn't be surprised if the idea of grinding it out for another 4-5 years to grow from $1B to a bigger potential outcome was a lot less exciting to the person with 10% fully vested than it would be to the person with 40%.
Based on my personal experience and many others I know, if there is somebody at the company with much more equity than everybody else, both philosophically and practically, it is their company, not yours. So while during the phase of vesting your shares it can make a lot of sense to be there, after you are fully vested the draw is much less. Over time the company isn't going to become any more "yours" and the people who own the majority of the equity have massive incentives to replace you and figure it out.
This is really the only perk of being an employee over a founder is that you can leave and it doesn't affect the company very much, whereas when founders leave it generally casts a very negative shadow on the company. So employees can go in for a 2-4 year shift whereas a founder needs to be prepared for a 7-10 year shift.
>I wouldn't be surprised if the idea of grinding it out for another 4-5 years to grow from $1B to a bigger potential outcome was a lot less exciting to the person with 10% fully vested than it would be to the person with 40%.
Your "grinding it out" phrase triggered another recollection about Facebook itself. Facebook had unequal splits[1] and Mark Zuckerberg had more shares than any of the other founders. I believe ownership was unequal in July 2006 when Yahoo offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion and Mark rejected the offer.[2] I'm not familiar enough with the timeline to know if the cofounders were still there and soldiered on after that point towards the 2012 IPO. Maybe they had contempt for MZ about their smaller piece of the pie and left early.
Based on my personal experience and many others I know, if there is somebody at the company with much more equity than everybody else, both philosophically and practically, it is their company, not yours. So while during the phase of vesting your shares it can make a lot of sense to be there, after you are fully vested the draw is much less. Over time the company isn't going to become any more "yours" and the people who own the majority of the equity have massive incentives to replace you and figure it out.
This is really the only perk of being an employee over a founder is that you can leave and it doesn't affect the company very much, whereas when founders leave it generally casts a very negative shadow on the company. So employees can go in for a 2-4 year shift whereas a founder needs to be prepared for a 7-10 year shift.