In the fall of 2010, I wrote a series of nine blog posts about Employee Equity as part of MBA Mondays. You can read all of them at the links below: Employee Equity: How Much? November 22, 2010 Employee Equity: Vesting November 15, 2010 Employee Equity: Restricted Stock and RSUs November 8, 2010 Employee Equity: The Option Strike Price November 1, 2010 Employee Equity: The Liquidation Overhang October 25, 2010 Employee Equity: Options October 18, 2010 Employee Equity: Appreciation October 11, 2010 Employee Equity: Dilution October 4, 2010 Employee Equity September 27, 2010 Most of what is in those posts remains valid today. But the final post, How Much, is very much out of date as the talent market has moved in favor of employees a lot in the past eight years. That has been particularly true of the top executives and some key talent categories. Most of the movement has been on the equity side of the comp package. The How Much post is one of the top posts on AVC. Though I wrote it 7 1/2 years ago, it was the seventh most popular post on AVC (sixth if you don’t count the home page) in the last year with almost 10k page views. So I have been concerned that this blog (aka me) is spewing out of date information to a lot of people every day. And so we are on a mission to fix that. I have enlisted my colleagues Bethany and Zach on this project and this is what we in the process of doing: We have collected data on employee equity grants from USV portfolio companies. Many of our portfolio companies use a reporting tool called Advanced HR and through it, we have been able to access anonymized data on every grant that these participating companies have made. Since these are our portfolio companies, we know what their equity is valued at and what it has been valued at over the years. We also understand the context behind many of the outlier grants. So we have been normalizing the data and bucketing it and looking at distribution curves and understanding it. We are mostly through all of this work and it is my hope we can publish the data before the middle of May. As part of that, I will rewrite the How Much post and I will go back and edit the original post with an update section at the end clarifying that the data has changed (a lot). We also plan to publish a calculator that will help a founder/CEO/HR team understand how to use the numbers we are going to publish. So stay tuned for this update. It has been a fair bit of work to do this update right and we are excited to get the data out there so all of you can use it. https://avc.com/2018/04/the-employee-equity-project/

In the fall of 2010, I wrote a series of nine blog posts about Employee Equity as part of MBA Mondays. You can read all of them at the links below: Employee Equity: How Much? November 22, 2010 Employee Equity: Vesting November 15, 2010 Employee Equity: Restricted Stock and RSUs November 8, 2010 Employee Equity: The Option Strike Price November 1, 2010 Employee Equity: The Liquidation Overhang October 25, 2010 Employee Equity: Options October 18, 2010 Employee Equity: Appreciation October 11, 2010 Employee Equity: Dilution October 4, 2010 Employee Equity September 27, 2010 Most of what is in those posts remains valid today. But the final post, How Much, is very much out of date as the talent market has moved in favor of employees a lot in the past eight years. That has been particularly true of the top executives and some key talent categories. Most of the movement has been on the equity side of the comp package. The How Much post is one of the top posts on AVC. Though I wrote it 7 1/2 years ago, it was the seventh most popular post on AVC (sixth if you don’t count the home page) in the last year with almost 10k page views. So I have been concerned that this blog (aka me) is spewing out of date information to a lot of people every day. And so we are on a mission to fix that. I have enlisted my colleagues Bethany and Zach on this project and this is what we in the process of doing: We have collected data on employee equity grants from USV portfolio companies. Many of our portfolio companies use a reporting tool called Advanced HR and through it, we have been able to access anonymized data on every grant that these participating companies have made. Since these are our portfolio companies, we know what their equity is valued at and what it has been valued at over the years. We also understand the context behind many of the outlier grants. So we have been normalizing the data and bucketing it and looking at distribution curves and understanding it. We are mostly through all of this work and it is my hope we can publish the data before the middle of May. As part of that, I will rewrite the How Much post and I will go back and edit the original post with an update section at the end clarifying that the data has changed (a lot). We also plan to publish a calculator that will help a founder/CEO/HR team understand how to use the numbers we are going to publish. So stay tuned for this update. It has been a fair bit of work to do this update right and we are excited to get the data out there so all of you can use it. https://avc.com/2018/04/the-employee-equity-project/

In the fall of 2010, I wrote a series of nine blog posts about Employee Equity as part of MBA Mondays. You can read all of them at the links below: Employee Equity: How Much? November 22, 2010 Employee Equity: Vesting November 15, 2010 Employee Equity: Restricted Stock and RSUs November 8, 2010 Employee Equity: The Option Strike Price November 1, 2010 Employee Equity: The Liquidation Overhang October 25, 2010 Employee Equity: Options October 18, 2010 Employee Equity: Appreciation October 11, 2010 Employee Equity: Dilution October 4, 2010 Employee Equity September 27, 2010 Most of what is in those posts remains valid today. But the final post, How Much, is very much out of date as the talent market has moved in favor of employees a lot in the past eight years. That has been particularly true of the top executives and some key talent categories. Most of the movement has been on the equity side of the comp package. The How Much post is one of the top posts on AVC. Though I wrote it 7 1/2 years ago, it was the seventh most popular post on AVC (sixth if you don’t count the home page) in the last year with almost 10k page views. So I have been concerned that this blog (aka me) is spewing out of date information to a lot of people every day. And so we are on a mission to fix that. I have enlisted my colleagues Bethany and Zach on this project and this is what we in the process of doing: We have collected data on employee equity grants from USV portfolio companies. Many of our portfolio companies use a reporting tool called Advanced HR and through it, we have been able to access anonymized data on every grant that these participating companies have made. Since these are our portfolio companies, we know what their equity is valued at and what it has been valued at over the years. We also understand the context behind many of the outlier grants. So we have been normalizing the data and bucketing it and looking at distribution curves and understanding it. We are mostly through all of this work and it is my hope we can publish the data before the middle of May. As part of that, I will rewrite the How Much post and I will go back and edit the original post with an update section at the end clarifying that the data has changed (a lot). We also plan to publish a calculator that will help a founder/CEO/HR team understand how to use the numbers we are going to publish. So stay tuned for this update. It has been a fair bit of work to do this update right and we are excited to get the data out there so all of you can use it. https://avc.com/2018/04/the-employee-equity-project/

In the fall of 2010, I wrote a series of nine blog posts about Employee Equity as part of MBA Mondays. You can read all of them at the links below: Employee Equity: How Much? November 22, 2010 Employee Equity: Vesting November 15, 2010 Employee Equity: Restricted Stock and RSUs November 8, 2010 Employee Equity: The Option Strike Price November 1, 2010 Employee Equity: The Liquidation Overhang October 25, 2010 Employee Equity: Options October 18, 2010 Employee Equity: Appreciation October 11, 2010 Employee Equity: Dilution October 4, 2010 Employee Equity September 27, 2010 Most of what is in those posts remains valid today. But the final post, How Much, is very much out of date as the talent market has moved in favor of employees a lot in the past eight years. That has been particularly true of the top executives and some key talent categories. Most of the movement has been on the equity side of the comp package. The How Much post is one of the top posts on AVC. Though I wrote it 7 1/2 years ago, it was the seventh most popular post on AVC (sixth if you don’t count the home page) in the last year with almost 10k page views. So I have been concerned that this blog (aka me) is spewing out of date information to a lot of people every day. And so we are on a mission to fix that. I have enlisted my colleagues Bethany and Zach on this project and this is what we in the process of doing: We have collected data on employee equity grants from USV portfolio companies. Many of our portfolio companies use a reporting tool called Advanced HR and through it, we have been able to access anonymized data on every grant that these participating companies have made. Since these are our portfolio companies, we know what their equity is valued at and what it has been valued at over the years. We also understand the context behind many of the outlier grants. So we have been normalizing the data and bucketing it and looking at distribution curves and understanding it. We are mostly through all of this work and it is my hope we can publish the data before the middle of May. As part of that, I will rewrite the How Much post and I will go back and edit the original post with an update section at the end clarifying that the data has changed (a lot). We also plan to publish a calculator that will help a founder/CEO/HR team understand how to use the numbers we are going to publish. So stay tuned for this update. It has been a fair bit of work to do this update right and we are excited to get the data out there so all of you can use it. https://avc.com/2018/04/the-employee-equity-project/

When a performer first starts out in a new system or level of play, they have to take apart their game and learn a new set of skills. If the performer is expected to perform brilliantly in her first few games in a new system, she will definitely disappoint. Josh Waitzkin (in his book, “The Art of Learning”) calls this principle “investing in loss.” The gifted boxer with a fabulous right and no left will get beat up while he tries the jab. And, the excellent soccer player with no left foot will be significant less effective while she invests in it. And, yet, investing in loss is the only way forward. But, how do you do it in competitive arenas like our working lives where there are seldom weeks when performance doesn’t matter? Josh’s response is to have an incremental approach that allows for times when you are not in peak performance state. We must take responsibility for our own learning and not expect the rest of the world to understand what it takes to be the best we can become. Michael Jordan made more last minute shots to win the game for his team. But, he also missed more last-minute shots to lose the game than any other player. We have to be willing to look bad to get good. PS: I love this framing. I think of this as part of the “What got you here won’t get you there” principle. We have to commit to reinventing ourselves from time to time. This framing makes it clear that the reinvention doesn’t come easy. Share this: Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Like this: Like Loading... Related https://alearningaday.com/2018/04/02/investing-in-loss/