Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures
Venture capitalist Fred Wilson took his weekly blog series “MBA Mondays” into the classroom this month to share the ins and outs of employee equity. Skillshare, a New York-based startup billed as a “marketplace of classes,” facilitated Wilson’s hour-long presentation.
Wilson began his class by asserting his belief in the importance of awarding employee equity. He summed this up with a comment once left on his blog by Jeff Minsch: “If anyone goes to the pay window, everyone goes to the pay window.”
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“What that means,” Wilison said, “is that you started a company, and you’ve now sold it for a $100 million and you and your co-founders are gonna make a bunch of money and you really ought to make sure that every single person who was involved in making that success happen makes a bunch of money, too.”
He added: “This is about making sure that everybody in your company can have some share in the thing that you’ve created and that you’re building.”
The remainder of Wilson’s presentation covers three points: issuing employee equity, structuring employee equity and how much equity to give out.
It’s a fantastic talk and Wilson provides supplementary material on his blog for viewers to learn more. Also, in a follow up blog post he makes sure to point out a mistake in his calculations: “The final dilution number for the founders in the dilution table should be 58.5% not 64.5%. And the number of shares to issue the CFO should be 75k shares not 46k shares.”
Check out Wilson’s talk below or visit livestream.com for video and photos from the class.
Credits: Photo and video from livestream.com
Hat tip to Geoff Wood
