I'd like to know more about the downsides of RSUs.<p>I've been offered some recently, and I feel like it's just a way of saying "yes, you can have some equity...<i>someday</i>. Meanwhile, you're still in the dark on shareholder issues and you can't see the balance sheets. Keep up the good work".<p>Is that a wrong way to look at this?
This comes at a curious time for me. Just recently a startup didn't start at all, because I and the other would-be co-founder couldn't agree on how to split the equity.<p>Can someone enlighten me please: is a 50/50 split reasonable for 2 founders of a coding-heavy startup, where each founder has roughly the same background? That is what I was asking for. My friend was asking to have 100% equity and I would get a sizable share of sales as a contractor for his company. It was our first startup, neither of us has previous experience running a startup or a business at all.<p>I'm very sad it didn't work out because we worked on the technology for almost 4 weeks and it was promising, and now I feel a bit "guilty" about not having "cooperated", but I just couldn't invest the effort, resources (we have no investment; we would be burning our savings for some months) and yet have no ownership at all of what I was creating and risking into.<p>Any thoughts into this will be greatly appreciated, as I have no other sources of feedback to evaluate my decision.
"If the founders are the top managers in the company, then the typical "non founder employee ownership" will tend to be between 10% and 20%."<p>Does this mean that all the "non founder employees" would split the 10-20% of the equity?
I'd really like to know this since none of the startups I've been involved with have had positive outcomes (buy out, IPO, merger etc).<p>If you're part of the 10-20% employee ownership, assuming that you have an "average" stake, what percentage of the overall deal do you usually walk away with?<p>I'm expecting this number to be painfully small and hardly f#ck you money, but I'd like to hear from those who have direct experience on this.<p>NOTE: I'm not asking about <i>founder</i> exits, because those are adequately covered in the media and other places. I want to know about all the folks who are in that magic 10-20% of employees. Outlier anecdotal evidence (e.g. Google secretaries, Microsoft mail room folks) need not be mentioned. :)