As an early startup founder, what can you offer employees besides the prospect of an exciting adventure and equity that has the potential to greatly impact their lives?
How you sell your story is a different ballgame, but there’s plenty to think about when offering and communicating the value of equity to your early employees.
If they don’t feel like they own a piece of the pie they are building, how will you keep them motivated enough to keep going? Or even motivate them enough to treat it like their own and build like they would build their own company?
Communication is key, and we are here to help!
Be transparent from day zero
Irrespective of whether their ESOP policies are good, bad or ugly, most founders suck when it comes to transparency. This results in a scenario where the team never treats equity as part of their compensation, essentially nullifying its very purpose.
Make details on vesting and strike price clear as day when rolling out an offer. In fact, we’d go so far to say that walk them through how you plan to provide liquidity in the future if the business turns out to be a success.
Educate and elucidate
A pain with equity and stock options is that plenty of your employees won’t know the ins and outs of how things work. While those who have some experience of options from their previous jobs (likely senior hires and C-level execs) won’t need too much handholding, you need to have a bird’s eye view of where everyone stands.
This could mean sharing available resources across the Infinyte blog, or even hosting company-wide meetings where employees get a complete picture of all jargons relating to equity and options.
Opening up the floors for a discussion on equity will make all option holders aware of where they stand, and how they can benefit when liquidity finally arrives.
Discuss roadmap for growth
Options won’t do much for your employees if the company doesn’t grow in value. If you have to sell them your vision, you need to lay down the roadmap you envision for the company’s valuation, and how their options will grow in value if that happens.
A constant stream of communication will, therefore, be necessary as the company hits new milestones such as new funding rounds or sales targets.
Inspire with real-world examples
Finally, what good is a dream if you don’t have a precedent? No, we are talking about you having made millionaires out of people, but you can always hark back on examples of startups like CRED, Razorpay and Zomato creating life-changing wealth for their early employees.
If you can, go ahead and bring one such employee to talk about their experience of wealth creation through equity grants.
Celebrate their milestones
When their options vest, or there is an increase in stock value, it’s a necessity to celebrate those events as milestones.
The idea is to make them feel special about what they hold, and something as simple as sending a small note when their options vest for the first time can go a long way in how they see and feel about being an owner.
Use a tool
All of this can seem overwhelming, especially if you are a small startup with limited resources and too much to do. Well, where’s tech when you need it? Turns out, there are tools that have built-in features to help you with almost all of the above with a simple setup.
Enter Infinyte Owners, the brand new superpower that allows your team to visualize their stock options the way they were always meant to — a life-changing way to actively participate in the growth of the company they are helping build. Count on us to help cut through the jargon on all things stock options and be the clairvoyant that shows future upside!
The platform is free-to-use and built keeping the builders in builders in mind. Get in touch with us, and we will take care of everything else.
