Can someone comment as to what kind of payday this IPO translates to for say the 30th engineer hired by Snap? (I realize that this is impossible to answer accurately, and that there is still a 4 month lockup)
Looks like engineers were offered 10k-35k shares at a $9.90 strike price in Jan of 2014.
So $250k - $875k. Not bad, but also not millionaire status. Also ISO's will be taxed heavily.
That means, today, those grants are at least 100k - 350k shares at a $0.99 strike price (assuming no other splits). Or $2,300,000 to $8,050,000.
Unless I'm missing something?
Edit: Ah the numbers above are actually too low. If you look that email also lists the percentages. 10,000 shares at that time was 0.022% which at the current valuation is actually $5,280,000 less some likely dilution.
They were already a mega hit with like 10 employees so I doubt anyone that hasn't been there super early (like first 5 employees) will become a millionaire off this IPO.
In fact, Snap's extreme generosity to employees has already swelled the existing share count. In 2016, it awarded 105 million new restricted share units (RSUs). All of those units, plus around 80 million awarded in previous years, will vest with the IPO. Those grants will represent one in six of Snap's shares. At $16 a share–the estimated high end for the price paid by the underwriters–those grants will enrich its 1,859 employees by $2.9 billion, averaging $1.5 million per person, although the rewards are, as usual, heavily skewed towards the top brass. And that's just a taste of what's coming.
But the Silicon Valley mold is: a couple of guys quit their jobs, hit up VCs for a month or two with the roughest sketch of an idea, get funded, and hire their first employee a couple of weeks later. That employee gets maybe 1% maximum, or the order of 1/50th or less of what the founders. Meanwhile, the engineer will bust his ass, show up at work every day and code some more at night, debug on weekends, etc. "We're all in this together, team!"
Then on the happy day years later, the founders start pricing out their MacLarens, while the engineers blink "WTF" at their actual payout.
So, if you get paid a market salary and benefits, you can't really expect to own much of the company that's providing you with that salary and benefits as it's essentially burning money on you. If you came in and said "can I get 1% ownership if I take 15k a year with no benefits" that would be a different story, but that's not how this works.
If the last priced round made that 1% worth $20M on paper, then that's unreasonable.