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    Henry Ward

    medium.com/@henrysward · Personal blog · on HN since 2015

    Henry Ward, CEO of Carta (formerly eShares), writes on cap tables, equity compensation, offer letters, and layoffs.

    Visit blogHN submissions
    StartupsManagementFinance & Investing
    What HN says

    HN links it for his Carta Covid-19 layoff post, which commenters say gave laid-off employees strong benefits compared with other companies.

    Stats for nerds
    37HN people shared it
    36linked in comments
    511story points
    Aug 2020last shared
    2015people per year2020

    Top posts on HN

    1. 1
      A better offer letter
      3 people · 159 points · first shared 2016 · 72 comments on HN
    2. 2
      Broken cap tables
      4 people · 157 points · first shared 2015 · 31 comments on HN
    3. 3
      Carta for Public Companies
      1 person · 48 points · first shared 2018 · 15 comments on HN
    4. 4
      Looking for founders for three startup ideas
      1 person · 32 points · first shared 2020 · 15 comments on HN
    5. 5
      How to Hire
      1 person · 30 points · first shared 2016 · 11 comments on HN
    6. 6
      Carta’s Covid-19 Layoff
      9 people · 23 points · first shared 2020 · 3 comments on HN
    7. 7
      Fixing 409A
      1 person · 16 points · first shared 2015 · Discussion on HN
    8. 8
      Bring employees out of the dark
      1 person · 9 points · first shared 2015 · 2 comments on HN
    9. 9
      EShares 101 – a great employee onboarding process
      4 people · 6 points · first shared 2015 · Discussion on HN
    10. 10
      A Manager’s FAQ
      2 people · 6 points · first shared 2016 · 1 comments on HN

    What HN people wrote when they linked it

    • rjdagostJan 2015

      To add to your list: as an early employee, there is a good chance that your equity will get diluted a bit. The small fraction of the company you "own" when you join (and after your options fully vest) might shrink significantly after future funding rounds. As an employee you have little leverage against getting diluted.

      The worst statistic of all: the vast majority of employees never exercise their stock options. According to this article, less than 5% of employee stock options are ever exercised: https://medium.com/@henrysward/broken-cap-tables-bbf84574a76a Start-ups would love for you to take a lower than market rate salary in exchange for options as the risk is entirely leveraged to the employee.

      If you are going to work for a start-up you should never count your options as payment in lieu of salary. They are a lottery ticket and they are no substitute for cold hard cash. There are various other good reasons one might have for joining a start-up, but options should not be one of those reasons.

    • erichurkmanJul 2016

      eShares (https://esharesinc.com) | Palo Alto, CA | ONSITE

      eShares is building the network of private asset ownership. Many of the companies on this page use eShares to track their cap table, and many of their investors use eShares to track their entire portfolio of private investments.

      Learn more about how we interview & hire [0] and more about our culture as a fintech startup [1].

      DevOps, mid-level: we are looking to hire a mid-level devops engineer who can help us build and plan for the infrastructure eShares needs for our rapid growth of customers and rapid expansion of our engineering and product teams. We want someone to bring best practices into our devops strategy.

      - Ansible, AWS
      - PostgreSQL
      - Redis
      - Python (Gunicorn, Celery)

      Contact: eric+devops@esharesinc.com

      [0] How to Hire https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-hire-34f4ded5f176

      [1] eShares 101 https://medium.com/@henrysward/eshares-101-e96d792bdc69

    • hn_throwaway_99Aug 2020

      In this situation the corporate doublespeak just came across as dishonest, as we would somehow skip the part about the layoffs.

      The CEO of Carta made a post about layoffs they had there a couple months back, and the contrast with this Mozilla post is night and day IMO: https://medium.com/@henrysward/cartas-covid-19-layoff-cbb80e3e8a5d

    • VintageLightApr 2020

      Carta (from the article) posted the benefits for employees who got laid off. They're pretty amazing relative to others. https://medium.com/@henrysward/cartas-covid-19-layoff-cbb80e3e8a5d

    • radkapitalApr 2020

      Wasn’t able to add Medium post linked in the tweet - https://medium.com/@henrysward/cartas-covid-19-layoff-cbb80e3e8a5d

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