The company played some nasty mind games with their employees regarding equity. They did a 7 (I think?) for 1 split, and then had the recruiters telling employees that they had "never seen a company give out so many shares before." They sent out spreadsheets with calculators that would let you estimate the value of your shares, and just casually let you know that Apple was trading at ~$700/share. iirc, they even pre-filled in the line for potential value with Apple's current share price (so, 5000 shares * 700 Apple-level share price = 3.5M). At every company meeting, they'd get really pumped about how they were going to IPO. They would throw parties celebrating their 100 millionth patient life covered, even though it seemed pretty obvious those numbers weren't real. No 401k match, since you're not going to need it after we IPO.
There was even a second market offering to let Ryan sell enough shares to pay his taxes and maybe buy a nice house in South Park.
I don't feel bad for the engineers, since they were generally exposed to enough information that they should have been able to call bullshit. I feel bad for the customer success team, who were often given a tenth of the amount of shares as engineers but would still frequently talk about retiring when we IPO. Hopefully the exec bonuses will be voted down, and there'll be a class action lawsuit.
This is a problem that faces a lot of startups. We should all be more wary of information that's given out, and be more demanding of transparency. Learn a less from all of us PF employees: the more a company talks about their IPO, the less likely it's going to happen.
There was even a second market offering to let Ryan sell enough shares to pay his taxes and maybe buy a nice house in South Park.
I don't feel bad for the engineers, since they were generally exposed to enough information that they should have been able to call bullshit. I feel bad for the customer success team, who were often given a tenth of the amount of shares as engineers but would still frequently talk about retiring when we IPO. Hopefully the exec bonuses will be voted down, and there'll be a class action lawsuit.
This is a problem that faces a lot of startups. We should all be more wary of information that's given out, and be more demanding of transparency. Learn a less from all of us PF employees: the more a company talks about their IPO, the less likely it's going to happen.