I agree that people should ask questions, but my advice remains for employees which is to consider shares, or rights to shares, held for a private company to have zero value.
If you are going to get enough out of working for a company then great, go for it. Conversely if your only motivation for working for the company is that they have offered you a lot of shares then you should take a step back and think long and hard about that.
That flips of course for a publicly traded company, those shares have recognizable value right from the start and you can use Black-Sholes or other future value estimators to get a handle on how much you should be swayed by those shares.
As the article points out, it is particular corrosive around the c-suite (CEO, CTO, Cx0 what ever) of people who founded the company. They will often hold a solid number of shares already and even though they shouldn't, will often do the math that if they had sold their shares in this round rather than generating new shares they would be multi-millionaires. Sometimes protecting that illusion becomes more important than making good decisions.
If you are going to get enough out of working for a company then great, go for it. Conversely if your only motivation for working for the company is that they have offered you a lot of shares then you should take a step back and think long and hard about that.
That flips of course for a publicly traded company, those shares have recognizable value right from the start and you can use Black-Sholes or other future value estimators to get a handle on how much you should be swayed by those shares.
As the article points out, it is particular corrosive around the c-suite (CEO, CTO, Cx0 what ever) of people who founded the company. They will often hold a solid number of shares already and even though they shouldn't, will often do the math that if they had sold their shares in this round rather than generating new shares they would be multi-millionaires. Sometimes protecting that illusion becomes more important than making good decisions.