Stock Options Q&A and Videos

In many European countries, total compensation tends to be more focused on salary rather than including stock options or sign-on bonuses, as may be common elsewhere. Total compensation is the salary, and in most salary negotiation tips they focus on how to bump up your equity in the company. Does someone have any advice on how to go about to get the most out of the salary negotiation in Europe?

Right now I am helping out at a startup with 0 revenue. It's a fun group to work with, hence I am helping them out.

There's a CEO and CTO. CEO has been working on it for 1.5 years, CTO for like half a year. I have just started out for about a month. The company has 0 revenue and 0 investors yet. CEO is just giving a projection of equity sharing. There might be a CMO joining soon.

CEO is suggesting following equity share:

• Founder 1: Himself 57%
• Founder 2: CTO 16%
• Soon to be Founder 3: CMO 8%
• Investors Seed / Series A: 13 %
• Options Pool: 5%

I am like the first developer, and he's suggesting like 0.5% of the option pool. They claim it to be a fair amount since he and CTO have made way more sacrifice so far. Right now I make sacrifices too. I am spending my nights and time in my weekend on it without any pay. And I don't have the knowledge of CMO.

I don't know much about reasonable percentage for this kind of stuff it's new to me.

But right now we're not getting any profit and I am sacrificing nights and time in the weekend on the project so I think it would be fair for founder 1 and 2 to give me some of their percentage and give me like approximately 10% or something.

So far it's been fun: Thinking if things go well, we can all become millionaires. But this 0.5% percentage doesn't fit in with that. It's a rather demotivating percentage.

I recently received an offer from a series D unicorn. They are giving me the option to trade off base salary and sign-on bonus for more equity and vice versa.  I’ve heard conflicting opinions about whether you should optimise for cash or for equity (some say optimise for equity, others say optimise for pay), so I want to get a good understanding of what factors I should consider when trading off pay for more equity?

I'm fortunate enough to have come from a decent background, so I don't need to worry about paying off debt or anything like that. It also happens that I live near family so cost of living isn't too big of an issue. So this is more about maximizing my compensation without having to worry about anything else.

Also, this company told me that they don’t negotiate, but I told them that I had a competing offer that paid me 15K more base. They gave more reasons about why they don't negotiate but said they’d see what they can do. I ended up getting the 15K. In previous calls, they definitely showed that the really wanted me (can tell through their language), so I was wondering if I could’ve gotten more? There’s a lot of factors/details that I left out to preserve anonymity but I’m happy to (carefully) provide any details left out.