"I declined an offer from a known and well funded startup because of a one year cliff on equity"
You might as well not bother interviewing at any startups if this is a deal-breaker for you. Whether you think it's fair or not this is an extremely standard term and no company is going to alter their employee stock grants on a one-off basis.
The one year cliff is not that problematic to me since I would expect I am getting paid market, and the options are like a hiring bonus (which you often must return if you quit within a year). What am I missing? Is people really worried that a startup whose stock has risen will fire a productive employee?
That said, I have seen 5 year vesting (which seemed like a red flag to me), and have heard of Amazon's schedule where you mainly vest in later years. These were bigger red flags for me than a 1 year cliff.
Depends on the company. I joined Twitter in 2016. The stock, which was circa 1/3rd of my total comp, had a one year cliff. 7 months in, one executive got the upper hand in a power struggle, pushing out my boss and laying off the people he hired, me included. I don't think they did it because of the stock. But I'm sure it didn't hurt. I'm still mad about it.
Disclaimer: Ex-Amazonian, so discount as you see fit based on whatever brainwashing you might assume I’ve been subjected to ;)
The rear weighted AMZN approach made sense to me in terms of both optimising retention and some proxy for reward to contribution. I say this also as someone who left after 2 years and as a result left most of their stock unvested. It definitely made the choice to leave much harder so I’d expect it to skew more heavily toward retention benefits than a typical schedule. A typical schedule has a linear growth of what you’ve vested. I’d expect the value of contribution of a person to grow over time though. More context, more experience, more everything. Hopefully that means the you 3 years from now is making a more significant contribution than the you they hired. Typical schedules hope that the increase in valuation accounts for that compounding return. AMZN have shifted it to the vesting schedule.
That said they always talk about “total compensation”. So for the stock you’re not getting in the first two years you typically get as cash via a “hiring bonus” anyway. You could always just use that cash to go buy the equivalent amount in stock, no vesting required.
I was exposed to this while talking to an Amazon recruiter recently, while I also hear stories about how they seem to work people to a breaking point.
The median tenure at AMZN is also 1.5yrs, per linkedin. Their strategy seems to be to work their people extremely hard to earn their RSUs and pay them like plebs with hard caps on earning potential (base comp).
As the other reply said, vesting was 5% first year, 15% second year, then 20% per six months.
As for why: a rebalancing of priorities re work/life/travel balance and a better sense of connectedness to my actual work and the success of the company. Not gonna lie though, I look back at what I left on the table and the AMZN share price over the past 2 years and I still wonder if it was the right choice.
I feel like amazon-style vesting helps remove some perverse incentives.
It makes "stay 53 weeks and cash out" less appealing, it makes "stay 6 more months to hit the next cliff" less appealing, and it rewards long-haulers (who are underpaid almost everywhere else in tech).
Yes, that was my hope also. As it becomes more common to not have a cliff.
It was just strange that the recruiter couldnt discuss this further or at least give an offer with a nice cash compensation that would be paid out monthly (sort of like how Amazon does it) to compensate for cliff.
Really? I'm surprised. My employer just removed cliffs for new offers, it does seem to becoming more popular. But my assumption is the cliff is something I couldn't easily negotiate as an individual.
It’s happened multiple times for me, all with extremely well known VC backed companies. Once at later stage, but applying for a very senior role, and another at an early stage, where there was a good fit.
It can be a tough sell, and recruiters are trained to just say no, but persistence pays off. Same thing applies to getting jobs in general. If you aren’t persistent in your application process and aggressive in your negotiation process, you simply won’t have the best outcomes. It just becomes easy to turn you down.
They will if they want you enough. Even Google can be talked out of the 1-year cliff. Doordash doing this means other employers will have to in order to compete if an employee has a competing offer from Doordash.
You might as well not bother interviewing at any startups if this is a deal-breaker for you. Whether you think it's fair or not this is an extremely standard term and no company is going to alter their employee stock grants on a one-off basis.