Comment by k5jhn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by k5jhn | Hacker News Reader

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Currently a dev at a pre-Series A startup.

Pros:

- both the freedom AND responsibility to build things that'll directly translate into increased growth/profits, or the opposite in the case of failure

- close-knit dev team, and in general everyone is chill, i.e company culture is great so far

Cons:

- my salary compensation is pretty average so I am hoping for an eventual big pay-out, but it's hard to gauge what the payout amount of my shares will be.. maybe this is just due to my ignorance/lack-of-experience (are there tools/calculations to figure this kind of stuff out?)

Here are a couple of articles that might help with regards to calculating your equity payout: https://codingvc.com/valuing-employee-options https://medium.com/@jamesseely/eshares-option-value-calculat...

I'd also really encourage you to talk to the founders of the company about this and ask them to walk you through their model for how much you should value your equity.

Our advice to founders is to walk every employee through a model that estimates the value of their options under different scenarios.

Really appreciate the links and feedback, thank you.

  > I am hoping for an eventual big pay-out

Please, please, make sure you have a plan for when this does not happen, your company evaporates overnight (because leadership didn't tell you) and you find yourself out of a job.

:thumbs-up:

https://tldroptions.io is all about estimating the approximate upside under a wide variety of exit scenarios. Even the basic answer ends up being “it depends...”

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