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:
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But the final post, How Much, is very much out of date as the talent market has moved in favor of employees a lot in the past eight years.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So I have been concerned that this blog (aka me) is spewing out of date information to a lot of people every day.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.
