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Comment by samt | Hacker News Reader

Also find out whatever you can about the current cap table. A cap table will tell you a lot about the history of the company any demons hiding in the closet that might prevent a buyout or later stage investment in the company. If say, a pool of 30 dentists owns 30% of the preferred stock with a 3x liquidation preference, run and run fast.

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While it's hard to reasonably argue that employees shouldn't know the valuation of their own equity, it's easier to argue that the cap table isn't any of their business. More information is usually better, but I might not push too hard on the terms of everyone else's shares.

Liquidation preference is an important one to know, and it's easy to make a case for it: when you're discussing valuation during negotiation (and you need to), and you get to the part about what the numbers look like if you're bought when doing $xMM/yr, you get to ask "how much of that number will VC take off the table?"

I think this highlights how strange the practice of employee stock is. If you were receiving the money as salary from your startup and investing it in another with the terms/information available to you, it would seem mad.

Do you know what percentage of one's salary is typically considered to be stock?

Yeah, like everything else here what you can reasonable ask for depends on company stage. It's not unreasonable for employees 2-10, say, to ask for a general characterization of the cap table and liquidation preferences.

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