Hi Product Hunt! When you get a new job offer, figuring what your compensation package really means can be tricky. We wanted to share a tool we built at Front to help candidates understand how much their equity is worth, would love your feedback :)
@collinmathilde This is great! You should partner with co-working spaces like WeWork, Galvanize, etc and offer this as a tool for all of their businesses that use their space.
@collinmathilde I think you guys did a good job of not diving into too many details. Sometimes the precision of equity valuation gives a false sense of accuracy. Adjusting the inputs and and watching the outcome change is a great feature that helps communicate how sensitive everything is.
This is awesome - very well done! I think it lends some credibility to early startups if they can point to an external tool, rather than only have their own projections. Of course, it all hinges on "expected outcome/exit" -- but the candidate can play with that and see the effect it has.
Well done, Front team! Feels great to see more efforts out there to make Equity easier to understand, this feels like a great complement to GitLab's concise writeup https://about.gitlab.com/handboo...
Thanks for making this, Mathilde! I think this is especially useful for women new to the tech space and as they negotiate their salaries. The more you know!
This is a very bad idea IMO and possibly opens you up to liability issues, if not at least setting the stage for litigation, if you don't make it very clear that this entire calculator is extremely speculative vs an expected outcome - IMO you should, at the very least, have the expected exit valuation scale from $0 and add some component of liquidity preferences (if not applicable now then at least show that they could be something in addition dilution to affect the final option value). Again, IMO I wouldn't even touch this outside of providing stock option plan documentation and suggesting the candidate consult an attorney/tax accountant to assess the "potential" value of the options.
@alankane I think the language here is rather clear ("this document is not a guarantee of anything", "you should consult with a specialist"). It's also the responsibility of each company to properly message the offer, but I still believe that this tool can be extremely helpful for candidates, if anything at least start a fair conversation with their prospective employer. You cannot expect each candidate to hire an attorney every time they get an offer :/
@twyril you can expect someone to hire an attorney when they feel misled or "wronged" ... just one person's opinion, I think the potential for a liability issue far outweighs upside in having an employer do the math, and I'm sorry, but if the downside is limited to a $10M exit valuation that is simply misleading and a wrong expectation to set in someone's mind.
What a great idea I like this feature also working in the same field and recently made a molar mass calculator website you can see here also there are so many other categories of calculation.
Front