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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

It'd be very interesting to look at real data from real companies and see how early employees made out. And naturally you'd want to include a wide spectrum of companies, both successful and unsuccessful. You could look at what rates people were actually paid, how much stock/options they got, how much it turned out to be worth and so on.

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As one data point, following the recent sale to HP, Autonomy staff in Cambridge split £30m between 175 people[1].

I'm in Cambridge and know various people who work/worked there, so I'm fairly sure that those 175 include many of the remaining "early employee" group. They'll be getting a nice windfall, obviously, but it's not never-work-again money.

For contrast, founder and CEO Mike Lynch has reportedly netted a tidy £500m or so for his share of the company.

For those not familiar with the numbers, Autonomy was basically the most successful software company in the UK, and the sale valued its shares at around a 60% premium give or take market fluctuations at the time of the announcement. It was founded in 1996. HP is the currently the biggest IT company in the world.

In other words, this exit is as big as anything in its generation is going to get in my country, and if you weren't founder/investor/board level, you weren't retiring from it.

[1] http://www.businessweekly.co.uk/hi-tech/12571-autonomy-cambr...

Exactly. And I'd bet that the employee pool is conditional on staying with HP for 1-4 years, whereas Lynch will get most or all of his payout immediately.

I wonder if the Startup Genome guys would be interested in tackling that? They seem more focused on "what makes a startup successful," but they seem to work by doing surveys like what you're talking about.

Now that would be an interesting study that would be quite oft-quoted.

If only there were someone around here with access to a lot of data about startups...

I guess they're a bit conflicted though: YC startups need employees, and if their results showed that the early employees were getting screwed, they might not want to release them.

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