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tensor · 3 years ago
One crucial thing not often talked about with this plan is that the stock is granted and vests quarterly. In fact, the amount of stock you get each quarter is also variable. E.g. if you choose to have 100k of equity each year, each quarter you get whatever amount of units equates to 25k of stock.

So what they've done is nearly completely untie compensation from the stock price. You neither benefit significantly nor lose significantly as the stock moves around. I've never in my life seen an equity plan like it, and that's not a comment on whether it's good or bad, just that it's unusual.

modeless · 3 years ago
So it's not an equity grant at all then. It's an employee stock purchase plan. You choose how much of your compensation buys stock and you get a small discount on the purchase price (called "bonus" in the article). That is exactly an ESPP.
nahname · 3 years ago
An ESPP is directing earned cash into stock. You buy the stock at time of payment.

This is directing equity into RSUs or ISOs at the open of the window. You will be subject to price fluctuations over the window, which you wouldn't be with an ESPP.

pastor_bob · 3 years ago
Yes, to me this basically sounds like ESPP without the discount

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paxys · 3 years ago
This is becoming more and more common at large tech companies. Stripe does the same thing.

Over the last decade and a half tech employees have enjoyed massive returns due to stock appreciation during their vesting term, and now employers want to eliminate that. Of course the flip side is that when the stock goes down - like right now - then employees benefit.

Ultimately they’re all going to cut out stocks entirely and just pay cash salary and bonus, like every other industry.

twblalock · 3 years ago
Why on earth would employers want to eliminate those massive returns? That's been an amazing tool for employee retention, especially for FAANG. If they reverted to paying cash plus bonus, they would be less competitive when hiring and retaining people.

The companies that are changing this are the ones whose stock tanked, and they are worried that employees will leave because of it. Companies whose stock did not tank are retaining their normal compensation programs.

BMorearty · 3 years ago
Replacing stock compensation with cash salary and bonus would be a terrible idea.

Other industries should be moving toward employee ownership, not the other way around. Employee ownership creates shared incentives. Shared incentives create alignment. Alignment helps eliminate an antagonistic relationship between employees and management. Instead of them vs. us, it moves it more towards all us. Instead of the fat cats and the lowly workers, everyone gets to reap the benefits or share the losses. Of course the founders and execs get more, I'm not saying it's equal, but it is a far better system than pure cash.

gpderetta · 3 years ago
But as long as the cash bonus has the same nominal value as the stock grant there is not much of a downside for the employee as in the worst case they can just buy the stock on the market (which should be possible for a large tech company).
ryanisnan · 3 years ago
If I'm an employee earning equity vs cash, I damn well want to make sure my incentives are aligned with the companies, e.g. the value increasing. This seems a bit perverse.
echelon · 3 years ago
Startups will offer stock and win.

If tech workers were united in fleeing giants to found or work at nimble upstarts, we would reap nearly all of the rewards.

3bproblem · 3 years ago
Stripe does this, and Coinbase's move to annual equity grants also has a similar effect. There are a lot of tradeoffs in all directions, but the fundamental one is that the reduction in risk naturally carries an equivalent reduction in ability to participate on the upside (eg table at the bottom here: https://www.aeqium.com/post/a-survey-of-equity-refresh-progr...).

You can also argue that it's not good for employees, because downside is capped (stock goes to $0, you keep your salary) but upside is unlimited (Shopify becomes the next Microsoft, you're still driving a Kia).

leoqa · 3 years ago
The reality is that RSUs are a better deal because of the unlimited upside. If my RSUs go to zero, I jump to another company and reset my cost basis- there is actually little risk here beyond the first year lock up.
gopalv · 3 years ago
> they've done is nearly completely untie compensation from the stock price.

Not entirely, they've created a relationship, but it is the opposite of what is normally considered in "line goes up" thinking.

Usually when a company/market does poorly, people don't have a strong reason to stick around as the possible compensation dwindles down.

The stock price on your joining date somewhat controls how many stock items you get. This is mostly luck - your "birth" into the company controls the payout multiple for the next 4 years.

Once the company starts doing poorly, it struggles to justify handing out extra compensation to employees and even if a select few are handed out more stock, it is usually not enough to keep a majority of folks in the building.

So with standard RSU models it'd be a good idea to join a company which is currently rated a BUY, but it is not great to stick around and try to wait for a turn-around if you got RSUs issued in boom times.

The "buy 100k$ every quarter" sort of model flips that thinking around. When the company does poorly, you get to sort of double down your bets on on the recovery path. And if your work pulls off a recovery, then you get rewarded directly for sticking through the bad patch (or if you don't believe in it - sell it the same day you get it and put it in ETFs, but not quit from a pay dip).

Also if the company is "buying" stock with cash intended for an employee instead of issuing it from some pool (also without an RSU discount), then this also has a nice effect of masquerading as a stock-buyback.

So it directly incentivizes people to stick at a company through a bad spot or at least softens that loss of critical talent when the company hits a rough patch without any additional distraction to the board.

lumost · 3 years ago
This might be better for most of employees. Big companies rarely benefit from the standard “lock in folks on the upswing” and “incentivize them to leave on the downswing” that stock grants usually do.

When the stock goes up, difficult conversations emerge when the company realizes it’s paying someone the equivalent of an entire team. On the way down it’s hard to manage comp expectations. An individual engineer rarely impacts the bottom line in a material way.

Which is to say, if tech workers can demand high six figure pay - it should probably be mostly cash for most public companies and individuals.

pc86 · 3 years ago
It is even worse than an ESPP, but also pushes your compensation out up to 90 days from when you should be earning it. It's literally the worst combination of all the options.
cma · 3 years ago
> So what they've done is nearly completely untie compensation from the stock price.

Dirty secret is at somewhere the size of Spotify no normal employee is going to move the stock price on their own to any extent, so these incentivization things even if they were aligned to increasing when the price increases only could incentivize positive behavior towards increasing the stock price if the employee didn't understand tragedy of the commons or something.

londons_explore · 3 years ago
So how is it different than just paying the employee cash and recommending that they buy shopify stock?

Is it just a user friction thing?

Vvector · 3 years ago
Stock Grants are not an "expense" under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. So by paying in stock, instead of salary, it increases profits on paper. It does help with cash flow and other tangible benefits.

Most employees would be wise to divest much of their company stock as soon as they are allowed. Don't have all your eggs in one basket.

WaxProlix · 3 years ago
It's easier to make stock out of thin air (well, sort of) than cash, and accounting wise it's much more pleasant for companies to do so.
acchow · 3 years ago
> You neither benefit significantly nor lose significantly as the stock moves around. I've never in my life seen an equity plan like it, and that's not a comment on whether it's good or bad, just that it's unusual.

I thought Stripe moved to this compensation model last year

tyre · 3 years ago
Yes we have this (I work at Stripe). It is an annual recurring grant that has a one year cliff then renews automatically to vest quarterly.

Say you get an offer with $100k in RSUs. That’s then divided by the stock price and that’s your initial grant. It vests in one year. After that you would do the same math again, except this time 1/4th vests quarterly.

It has pros and cons. It works well in challenging macroeconomic environments for the reasons others have mentioned.

hedora · 3 years ago
I have heard of these. I wouldn't accept an offer like this unless the fixed comp was 2-3x normal market value for my services.

(The stock of my employers usually goes up during my vesting periods, and usually by well more than is needed to double my total comp -- the 2-3x is risk adjusted)

disgruntledphd2 · 3 years ago
If your career mostly spans the last decade, it should be noted that this was a really really weird decade in terms of asset appreciation vs inflation.

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foobarian · 3 years ago
If there is a vesting start delay then it's still not equivalent to an ESPP. But once you're in the middle of the pipeline I guess it's pretty similar.
foolfoolz · 3 years ago
this is a massive pay cut for anyone working at a growing company. you lose so much potential upside with the stock if you keep “buying in” each quarter/year instead of once at the beginning of a 4 year grant and hoping it goes up.

this looks like a great way for companies to protect themselves from spending too much on employee stock compensation and frame it as a gift of choice

knodi123 · 3 years ago
> So what they've done is nearly completely untie compensation from the stock price.

But it IS tied to the change in price- right?

pc86 · 3 years ago
Using the example above, you get $25,000 in stock every 3 months. So the number of shares are variable, so the price is irrelevant to you. If you sell as soon as you get it, it's the same as $25k cash, e.g. completely divorced from the stock price.

If it was tied to the stock price, like every other RSU program on the planet, you'd get x number of shares. So as stock price goes up, your compensation goes up. Your compensation is tied to the stock price.

jxf · 3 years ago
No. Your total compensation is fixed. You're deciding how much of it goes to stock (as opposed to your _grant size_ being fixed).
ranman · 3 years ago
Do you know if this creates significant administrative overhead?
LudwigNagasena · 3 years ago
What is even the point? Some of sort tax benefits?
JimmieMcnulty · 3 years ago
(One of) the largest retailers in the world also does this, I believe.
trynewideas · 3 years ago
My experience is probably not relevant to the audience here, but having worked at startups largely in non-engineering support roles that got smaller or heavily diluted grants, I've lost about $3,000 on options in 10 years in tech.

I paid in $17,500 at two places where I had vested any options, all ISOs, and cashed out ~$14,500: broke even on an IPO at $7,500 vested, and lost $3k of $10k after the company was sold for less per share than the strike price of my options.

If I had stayed at the IPO'd company longer I could've gotten a higher-class of option, but my salary there was $15k/year less than the bootstrapped no-equity company I left them for, and the returns over two years of vesting would've still been less than one year of difference in salary.

At most of the places I worked, I either didn't make enough money or experienced too much external financial distress to actually buy all of the options I vested. Which is good, because none of them appreciated and most depreciated in value by 20%. If I had exercised all of my vested options I would've lost up to another $5-7k - at best I would have lost another $2-3k.

The only RSUs I was ever offered vested 2 weeks after I left a job that I'd had for almost six years, for a role elsewhere paying $25k/year more. The RSUs were a surprise bonus worth less than $5,000 and tacked onto everyone at the company, including roles that had already gotten larger RSU grants. If I had stayed two weeks longer and vested them, then when the company sold they would've been worth less than $4,000. Between the salary difference, a much smaller insurance deductible at the new job, and a 4x larger 401k match, I had effectively made up the difference by my fourth paycheck (eight weeks) just on salary.

On my experience I'd take the cash every single time. Reading the replies here, it seems like engineers, managers, and early hires live in a completely different reality regarding equity.

htrp · 3 years ago
I think the answer is that for everybody who brags about the equity package there are 9 other people who don't talk about the underwater options or the losses they ended up taking
trynewideas · 3 years ago
Working at a company for almost six years, with equity as a significant part of the compensation, and losing 20% of what I exercised - in my fourth startup with an equity component, none of them doing better than break-even - means I just do not care about equity when offered it anymore.

If I'm offered, say, $150k + ISOs now, my brain just chucks it out the other end as $150k + $0. And I got to that place even before the market started to fall over.

I remember a recruiter in the offer stage of one job describing the ISOs - "if we go 2x, your options will be worth $XX,XXX. If we go 10x, they'll be worth $X,XXX,XXX" - and I had to cut her off as gently as I could so we could get to the health insurance that I would probably be maxing out the deductible on instead. (That job didn't last long enough to vest any of the options; laid off after a leadership change/re-org.)

mabbo · 3 years ago
In no way do I speak for my employer, but on a personal level, this has been amazing for me and I'm so grateful the company did this.

I'm very conservative about investing, and don't want to have a large amount of my portfolio tied up in the company I work for. I'm maxed out on cash (there's a minimum equity portion at my level) and my additional income goes into a broader portfolio of investments.

duxup · 3 years ago
>don't want to have a large amount of my portfolio tied up in the company I work for.

Just before the .com bust a company I worked for decided to remove the option for employees to just dump their 401k contributions into company stock, and removed the option to direct a massive % of their paycheck into the company stock purchase plan. (I believe some of these limits became law later on but at the time it was legal)

Some folks got really upset by that. The argument at that time was "we don't to be a part of employees suddenly being broke if things go south".

About a year later they were right, things went south. Our stock did sorta well in the long term (not great short term of course), but IMO it was a good choice.

mabbo · 3 years ago
This is a large part of why I feel this way.

I grew up near Ottawa, and had a lot of friends whose parents worked at Nortel. They were compensated with a lot of stock, which they held onto (it keeps rising, after all). Their pension plan was mostly invested in the company stock too.

When the company fell apart (let's set aside whose fault that is- different topic), they lost their jobs, their savings, their pensions, in their 40s and early 50s mostly.

gadders · 3 years ago
It's 14 years since Lehmans went bust. Plenty of people there lost their wage and their investments (in Lehmans stock) when the company went under.

Stock options can be great, but you need to be aware of the concentration risk.

mym1990 · 3 years ago
Isn't one benefit of these programs(from the employer side) that employees are more directly tied to company outcomes, and thus will put out better work/product? Of course one person won't shift the stock price, but as a collective, over time, it certainly would.
maerF0x0 · 3 years ago
Its a very efficient thing for them to do too if ultimately you're just going to sell all and then reinvest.

Ideally they would have started this program at a high stock price, but now better than never.

MEMORYC_RRUPTED · 3 years ago
Same here.

It's also nice that I happen to live in a country that gives a tax break on your (monetary, not stock) income, so that makes the choice for money even easier.

Reinvest it in an index fund, and forget about it. Yeah, I might miss out on significant gains, but I might also not. Less risk for a reasonable yield.

xal · 3 years ago
Added some additional information here: https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1570791158691012610

It's a really great system. We recommend that people borrow from it liberally.

knrz · 3 years ago
When people ask about what it’s like doing tokenomics for crypto projects, well, it’s an exercise in applied systems design. Bravo on this system man! Any plans on open sourcing some of the stuff, like the math?
mmastrac · 3 years ago
I obviously don't want to give financial advice, but every time I've traded cash for stock in comp it's worked out for me in spades in the long run. This doesn't happen for everyone, it might not happen for you, but it's been very good to me on three separate occasions.

Just remember that it's terribly illiquid and you're going to doubt your decision, potentially up to a decade later.

boringg · 3 years ago
If you did this at any time in the last 10 years you were probably rewarded handsomely. However the macro environment has significantly changed and I don't think your past behavior would be predictive of future performance.
mjr00 · 3 years ago
For the tech sector it's really been more like the last 22 years. There hasn't been an extended downturn in US tech stock since the original dot-com bubble. The 2008 recession ended up being a 1-2 year blip. The COVID contraction was extremely brief. By comparison, if you invested in the NASDAQ in 1999/2000, you'd need to wait 12-14 years to break even.

I don't have a crystal ball, of course, but to me things are looking a lot closer to 2000 than 2008.

time_to_smile · 3 years ago
> it's terribly illiquid

I'm amazed at how many people that get a significant portion of their comp as RSUs hang on to their shares after vesting.

During this insane bull market it's happened to work out, but having your income and a major portion (for most tech workers) of your assets perfectly correlated is absolutely a bad investment idea, not to mention the fact that you can only trade during approved windows and are not allowed to do any hedging (such as buying protective puts).

Even if you're wildly bullish on your company, at the very least diversify a bit with highly correlated stocks (for example if you're a GOOG during the last decade at least split it up among other FAANG). This way you can at least protect yourself in the event that your particular company gets hit hard.

It's incredible how far away the dotcom burst is in people's minds (or even 2008). Cheap money has led to an insane period of growth in tech, but investing as though that were the norm is very risky (without even optimizing your reward for that risk).

muglug · 3 years ago
The best financial decision I ever made was to sell my shares after vesting.

I realised that even if I believed in the long-term business model of the company, having a significant portion of my money tied up with a single stock was not a good idea.

It would have still been a good idea even if those shares hadn't lost 90% of their value in the following year.

ghaff · 3 years ago
I was working for a major tech company—definitely not a startup during dot-comb. I had some amount of vested shares which seemed a lot at the time. I spent some but held onto a few tens of K$. Stock went down from over $100 at peak to about $4. By years later had recovered to about $25–and then Dell acquired for a premium.
turtlebits · 3 years ago
Tech base salaries are so high that it's easy to keep RSUs. Also, IME, within the last ~18+ years it's been extremely beneficial to hang onto them.
rahimnathwani · 3 years ago
Endowment effect.
neon_electro · 3 years ago
My data point is the opposite, the one time I accepted equity in the form of options, stayed 4 years to vest it all, and got lucky where the company was acquired, the payout before taxes was worth less than if I had simply negotiated an additional $10k before taxes on my salary.

I’m not optimistic for future employers offering me equity actually worth more than cash over the 4 years it takes to vest.

dboreham · 3 years ago
Do you mean "traded cash for stock"?
Nifty3929 · 3 years ago
I guess it's a bit ambiguous which direction you mean, either way. Maybe "gave up stock in exchange for cash" or vice versa?
mmastrac · 3 years ago
Yeah, fixed it in my comment - thanks!

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bushbaba · 3 years ago
This is the same as statistically from loading a 401k out performs DCA throughout the year.

Sure this year sucks, but if only 1-2 years out of 8 perform worse, BUT 6-7 years you perform better. Then holistically you’re still better off.

When you invest look at the long term not short term.

bumby · 3 years ago
Isn't this dependent on timing and isn't part of the point of DCA to mitigate timing risks?

E.g., If I loaded my 401k just before the bottom fell out of the market, you need a much higher proportion of good years to dig out from that hole. With DCA, you would have a shallower hole to climb out of.

(Possible I misinterpreting what you meant, or that I am just not financially saavy enough to chime in)

cortesoft · 3 years ago
It depends on what stage your company is, but the vast majority of start ups fail… so for most people at startups, cash is going to be much more reliable. I worked at two startups prior to my current job that both went out of business. I had a few opportunities to take more equity or cash, and I’m glad I took cash every time. I would have gotten zero if I took the equity.
jacques_chester · 3 years ago
"Every time I've traded cash for winning lotto tickets it's worked out for me in spades in the long run."
shabbatt · 3 years ago
When they were printing money endlessly and rates were low, your strategy is sound. However, the house of cards is now crumbling and there is no end in sight to rate rises.

My hedge fund manager friend for a private family office is saying we will see double digit rates by end of 2023. If you believe this then you know what to do. If not, you should at least think what such macro conditions would do to liquidity.

triceratops · 3 years ago
Sounds like the thing to do now is sell everything vested so far, then hodl new vests. Falling prices means the vests will hit with lower income (and smaller tax bill) but are likely to go up when interest rates fall again.
its_bbq · 3 years ago
ELI Financially Illiterate. What do high Fed interest rates mean in this case?
UncleMeat · 3 years ago
Is your hedge fund manager friend shorting bond funds like crazy? If not, why not?
nemo44x · 3 years ago
Considering they’re pushing 75% in Argentina, 10% sounds like a deal.
nyokodo · 3 years ago
> it's been very good to me on three separate occasions.

Were those occasions during the mass retirement of the boomer generation leading to accelerating liquidation of stock market positions while the replacement generations are inadequate in number to replace the retirees during the collapse of globalization likely causing drops in worker productivity? Or were they during the longest stock market bull run in history?

amrocha · 3 years ago
https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1570791158691012610

It's funny seeing the example they give has total comp at 200K considering that a year ago they were still paying less than 100K USD (sightly over 100K CAD) for senior staff

danbrooks · 3 years ago
I interviewed with Shopify earlier this year and they were offering ~200k for "Senior" tech positions.
amrocha · 3 years ago
Glad to hear it! I remember reading news that they increased pay across the board. Probably to deal with the exodus of fully vested senior staff that happened during covid.
shabbatt · 3 years ago
Personally if I was a shopify employee and I was looking at all these layoffs coinciding with rate rises with more to come, I would think liquidity will quickly dry up and opt for cash.

I am open to rebuttals but I'm hearing that we will be seeing double digit interest rates again like the 70s.

Shindi · 3 years ago
I guess it depends on your financial goals. I'm a younger big tech employee that has at times seen my income drop in half. However, I personally believe tech will have a massive rebound in the next 2-10 years and long term capital gains tax is really nice.
fiat_fandango · 3 years ago
I think the better move for most of these folks is to wring as much cash as they can out of their current gig at Shopify and trade up to a new gig with a fresh stock grant at basically any other company. Joining G / Meta right now gives you incredible leverage if things bottom out any time soon.