Index Ventures

Most startups are open to trading cash for equity if you ask. Many even offer it explicitly. Investors also encourage it, e.g. see Index's Rewarding Talent guide: https://www.indexventures.com/rewarding-talent/balancing-cash-and-equi… When I make someone an offer, I give them a spreadsheet where they can plug in different salaries and equity stakes to see outcomes based on future funding events, valuations, and exit scenarios. Without exception the people who've leaned into equity have turned out to be the best performers and ended up with higher salaries anyway, but a majority favor cash up front.

Another excellent overview was just published this morning by Bryan Offutt: https://www.indexventures.com/perspectives/everything-is-a-workflow-ou…

Co-founder of Trello Joel Spolsky wrote a blog post about today's news. Worth reading if you're interested in the thinking behind the deal: http://indexventures.com/news-room/news/trello-raises-10m-series-a-fun…

The best resource on equity: https://www.holloway.com/g/equity-compensation Earlier version on GitHub: https://github.com/jlevy/og-equity-compensation Also look at the Index Ventures link and calculator: - https://www.indexventures.com/rewardingtalent/calculating-initial-gran… - https://www.indexventures.com/optionplan From your question and knowing nothing else, I assumed it was probably low - but it depended primarily on salary and total compensation (is it market rate for your friend? How far off?). From other answers (the company's fair market value is $30- $70 million vs $0 or unknown, the salary is slightly under market rate), it depends on the difference between your friend's total compensation here and other offers (or realistic other offers they theoretically could get). I'd ask for more than the difference between this start up's total comp and other offers. Why? Expected value and risk. Get a reasonable risk adjusted amount given liquidity and likelihood it will ultimately be worth $0, $1,000, or even $10,000 (good chance it's in the 90-98% range, and if the company wasn't already worth something it'd be closer to 99%). It's probably in the ballpark of fair, but not quite there for your friend.

Yeah it’s a pretty surreal feeling especially considering how Germany has an absolutely antiquated system on startup stock options that would simply tax your potential gains to oblivion, which ranks bottom in Europe together with Belgium. See https://www.indexventures.com/rewardingtalent/country-detail-tables-ge… Still considering leaving in the near future because of this and a few other factors (e.g. gloomy winter).

https://www.indexventures.com/rewardingtalent/calculating-initial-gran… has some benchmarks (take with a grain of salt)

AFAIK, the creators created incident.io as a spin-off [1] :) Smart move, I must say. 1 - https://www.indexventures.com/perspectives/incidentio-raises-47-millio…

This overall seems like a very useful resource for EU-based founders. That said, their suggestion of "Seriously consider back-loaded vesting schedules" is employee unfriendly (https://www.indexventures.com/blog/rewarding-talent-quick-guide, tip 5) In particular the idea of a 10/20/30/40 vesting schedule is non-standard, except maybe at places like Amazon. IMHO, if you want to retain people longer, use additional refresh grants instead.

If people are curious as to why VCs are interested in open-source businesses: http://indexventures.com/news-room/blog/a-perfect-storm-now-is-the-tim…

It's not that uncommon to keep the "CTO" title and not be the primary manager of the engineering organization. There are all kinds of things you can do with the org chart. If I recall correctly, Clickhouse works this way. The company's cofounders comprise three people [1]: * Aaron, a sales-oriented CEO from Elastic and Salesforce * Alexey, the original Clickhouse developer, as CTO * Yury, an experienced engineering executive from Google/Netflix as "President" An excerpt from the launch announcement [2]: > While negotiations were still ongoing, Katz decided they needed a third co-founder. “I kept thinking, if I could get a third co-founder to run product and engineering, and if I could find someone with the same level of experience building distributed systems on open-source that I have on go-to-market, it could be a really compelling combination,” Katz says. --- --- [1] https://clickhouse.com/company/our-story [2] https://www.indexventures.com/perspectives/the-fast-and-the-furious-ho…

Went through my Pinboard to extract all these: - https://797capital.com/ - https://www.indexventures.com/ - https://www.sparkcapital.com/ - https://www.hcp.com/ - https://hvflabs.com/ - https://www.republiccapital.co/ - https://plus.vc/ - https://www.rarebreed.vc/ - https://www.dragonfly.xyz/ - https://macventurecapital.com/ - https://parafi.com/ - https://www.chingona.ventures/ - https://www.plexocap.com/ - https://lowercarboncapital.com/ - https://www.blckvc.org/ - https://www.gsr.io/ - https://rbf.capital/ - https://www.allraise.org/ - https://betaworksventures.com/ - https://www.gfrfund.com/ - https://www.hustlefund.vc/ - https://www.atelierventures.co/ - https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/ - https://www.nfx.com/ - https://645ventures.com/ - https://backstagecapital.com/ - https://panteracapital.com/firm/ - https://femalefoundersfund.com/ - https://susaventures.com/ - https://atomic.vc/ - https://homebrew.co/ - https://www.cowboy.vc/ - https://foundersfund.com/ - https://www.kaporcapital.com/ - https://www.felicis.com/ - https://www.cleocap.com/ - https://www.ggvc.com/ - https://www.haystack.vc/ - https://www.menlovc.com/ - https://www.battery.com/ - https://www.nea.com/ - https://www.greycroft.com/ - https://group.softbank/ - https://twosigmaventures.com/ - https://www.redpoint.com/ - https://www.angellist.com/ - https://luxcapital.com/ - https://lsvp.com/ - https://www.bvp.com/ - https://upfront.com/ -…

This letter is timed with our Series B announcement today! We just did a 1hr livestream here giving context and answering Q&A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E40KwlxZJFI Additional coverage for more info: - https://www.geekwire.com/2022/temporal-is-a-unicorn-developer-producti… - https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/16/temporal_103m_funding/ - https://siliconangle.com/2022/02/16/temporal-raises-103-million-accele… - https://dailyuknews.com/tech/temporal-raises-103m-in-series-b-funding/ - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/temporal-io-raises-103-million-17000069… - https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/CW-Developer-Network/Temporal-call… - https://www.indexventures.com/perspectives/everything-is-a-workflow-ou…