updated 2022-11-29

Target audience

You have an offer at a tech company and are trying to understand it, for the purpose of evaluating the offer itself, the level of your company's transparency with its employees, or negotiating it.

See Negotiation for more on the latter.

Standard offer details

If the company is not forthcoming about anything, or terms like the equity vest are nonstandard, this is a red flag without good justification.

Base salary
Benefits (health, 401k)

For big companies, you can find benefits information on levels.fyi/benefits, which also serves as a nice checklist for comparison purposes.
Bonus

If ~Series D onward the company may have a target cash bonus percentage. You should expect this for public companies.

All about equity: the reason you're joining a startup

Number of options and type (ISO / NSO / RSU / bespoke schemes for Waymo, Angellist, etc)
Terms (should be 4-year vest with a 1-year cliff, and equal monthly vest thereafter)
- Stripe and Lyft are now offering 1-year grants (you might get 10k RSUs the first year, but if the stock price doubles, you might only get 5k the following year).
  - Stripe has the clout and brand among engineers to pull this off, but in general this offer is more appealing if your alternative is big tech (because your total payout is much more fixed) and less appealing if you’re betting on a growth company (for the same reason).
- CloudKitchens and Amazon offer backweighted vesting (AMZN's is 5%, 15%, 40%, and 40% vest per year).
  - I would value this grant at 50% of what it otherwise would be and consider it to be a red flag.
Current valuation
What is the runway given current funding and expected hiring plan?
- Should be over ~1.5y unless there’s a good reason (like an imminent fundraise), though this depends on many factors.
Current 409a (exercise) price per share

Table of contents

Target audience

Standard offer details

All about equity: the reason you're joining a startup