A CEO of one of our portfolio companies sent me a question about process in making offers and equity grants. I sent him a reply. And I thought, “this reply is a blog post”. So here is the reply with the specifics redacted. I hope folks will find this useful.
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It is a Board’s responsibility to approve all option grants. Most boards do this at the start of the Board Meeting. It is usually just a formality, but it is good governance to do that.
The management team obviously can’t wait for the Board Meetings to make offers. So most companies make offers that are contingent on board approval, but that approval is assumed that it is going to be there. Otherwise the management will be in a tough spot having made a promise they can’t keep.
What I generally suggest is that management have a standard options grant. It could be as simple as “everyone gets at least 1000 shares when they join, important role players get 5000 shares, directors get 10,000 shares, software engineers get 10,000 shares, senior software engineers get 20,000 shares, VPs get 50,000 shares. C level gets 100,000 shares”
I just made that up. You should make one that makes sense to you.
Then you get the Board to sign off on the standard grants. Then you can make offers with standard grants in them knowing that they will be approved.
If you want to go wildly off the standard grant for a special situation (relo, super star, etc), just shoot the board an email and get buy-in before making the offer. You will still want to get formal approval at the next Board Meeting.
I also suggest building an options budget. To do this you take your standard grant schedule, and then map it to your hiring and retention plan (I suggest granting options to current employees every two years as part of a retention plan) and then you will have an options budget for the next few years. That is a great thing to have.
For many of you, this is all obvious stuff. But you would be surprised how confusing all of this is to many entrepreneurs. So I figured I would put it out there.
