Rather than loudly proclaiming your ignorance about casions and options, you should introspect.
I know several people who successfully negotiated better terms. Demanding "adequate" salary and valueing options at "zero" are two seperate tasks. You assume latter (options not valued at 0) implies former (salary not adequate) its a statement about your risk averse world view, not a statememt of fact.
As far as meekness, loudly proclaiming that you are valuing options at zero is great way of letting your co workers and others know of your level of interest in the success of company. At which point if not meek you would surely come across as contemptuous, lest the company suceed and your coworkers end up better off than you.
And for every person you know there are dozens of stories about people who didn't even come close to recouping their salary differential. And those are just the "successful" startups that had some sort of exit. So the risk is (obviously) real.
> its a statement about your risk averse world view, not a statememt of fact.
No, it's a (true) statistical statement that you're misrepresenting as a categorical one.
> loudly proclaiming that you are valuing options at zero is great way of letting your co workers and others know of your level of interest in the success of company
Does the VC who's investing in a profile of N other companies also not have much interest in the success of the company? I mean, if they REALLY believed in the success of the company, then why aren't they just throwing all N at the company?
The only difference between the VC and the employee is that the employee is providing a limited resource (time) that can't be split among N bets, while the VC has enough cash to afford to make risky bets.
So it's entirely possible that the company has an negative expected value for an employee and also a positive expected value for the VC (and founder, but for different reasons).
> So it's entirely possible that the company has an negative expected value for an employee and also a positive expected value for the VC
Which is exactly the scenario the article is warning about: share dilution, refinancing, and all those other strange terms, often rendering the employees' options worthless over time (but not the VC's of course)
> As far as meekness, loudly proclaiming that you are valuing options at zero is great way of letting your co workers and others know of your level of interest in the success of company. At which point if not meek you would surely come across as contemptuous, lest the company suceed and your coworkers end up better off than you.
You don't have to be contemptuous to be confident in your own worth and realistic about how much you can influence the company's chances. By working for a company you are already long that company; you should be looking to diversify. The people who "drink the kool-aid" and get extremely personally devoted to their company are not exactly respected, IME.
I know several people who successfully negotiated better terms. Demanding "adequate" salary and valueing options at "zero" are two seperate tasks. You assume latter (options not valued at 0) implies former (salary not adequate) its a statement about your risk averse world view, not a statememt of fact.
As far as meekness, loudly proclaiming that you are valuing options at zero is great way of letting your co workers and others know of your level of interest in the success of company. At which point if not meek you would surely come across as contemptuous, lest the company suceed and your coworkers end up better off than you.