Henry Ward

Carta (from the article) posted the benefits for employees who got laid off. They're pretty amazing relative to others. https://medium.com/@henrysward/cartas-covid-19-layoff-cbb80e3e8a5d

eShares (https://esharesinc.com) | Palo Alto, CA | ONSITE eShares is building the network of private asset ownership. Many of the companies on this page use eShares to track their cap table, and many of their investors use eShares to track their entire portfolio of private investments. Learn more about how we interview & hire [0] and more about our culture as a fintech startup [1]. DevOps, mid-level: we are looking to hire a mid-level devops engineer who can help us build and plan for the infrastructure eShares needs for our rapid growth of customers and rapid expansion of our engineering and product teams. We want someone to bring best practices into our devops strategy. - Ansible, AWS - PostgreSQL - Redis - Python (Gunicorn, Celery) Contact: [email protected] [0] How to Hire https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-hire-34f4ded5f176 [1] eShares 101 https://medium.com/@henrysward/eshares-101-e96d792bdc69

To add to your list: as an early employee, there is a good chance that your equity will get diluted a bit. The small fraction of the company you "own" when you join (and after your options fully vest) might shrink significantly after future funding rounds. As an employee you have little leverage against getting diluted. The worst statistic of all: the vast majority of employees never exercise their stock options. According to this article, less than 5% of employee stock options are ever exercised: https://medium.com/@henrysward/broken-cap-tables-bbf84574a76a Start-ups would love for you to take a lower than market rate salary in exchange for options as the risk is entirely leveraged to the employee. If you are going to work for a start-up you should never count your options as payment in lieu of salary. They are a lottery ticket and they are no substitute for cold hard cash. There are various other good reasons one might have for joining a start-up, but options should not be one of those reasons.

In this situation the corporate doublespeak just came across as dishonest, as we would somehow skip the part about the layoffs. The CEO of Carta made a post about layoffs they had there a couple months back, and the contrast with this Mozilla post is night and day IMO: https://medium.com/@henrysward/cartas-covid-19-layoff-cbb80e3e8a5d

Wasn’t able to add Medium post linked in the tweet - https://medium.com/@henrysward/cartas-covid-19-layoff-cbb80e3e8a5d