This is an improvement in some areas. However it allows companies to terminate employees for cause and take back the shares they have already vested.

In my opinion, if equity is presented as an important part of compensation, it shouldn't be something that can be taken back any more easily than past salary could be. Looking at what happened at Skype, Zynga and other companies is enough that I would mostly discount any equity offered under such an agreement.

Don't have time to go through the docs just yet, but great to see mentions of cashless exercise included. A more generous post-termination exercise window would have been a nicer default, but I get that's still the norm in many YC companies.

Over time I suspect that will change as more and more people learn the questions they should ask when evaluating an offer, i.e., as they transition from naive price takers to more sophisticated price setters. This link was circulated on HN a few weeks(?) ago, but it's worth reposting: https://github.com/jlevy/og-equity-compensation.

And here are some companies that offer >90 days: https://github.com/holman/extended-exercise-windows (e.g., Coinbase and Pinterest with 7 years, Quora and Asana with 10 years, etc.). Interesting to see two companies in the list founded by early Facebook employees -- well, cofounder and CTO -- do longer periods. Wonder if people got burned there by the standard period?

Curious if there's been any attention given to Progressive Equity, the stock plan that Andrew Mason introduced for Detour almost a year ago:

http://blog.detour.com/introducing-progressive-equity/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9336392

It seems like a good way to fix problems of early employees being under-incentivized to take on startup-level risk, and to stay with the company once later high-level employees have been hired above them. Have any YC companies tried it out? Any plans to incorporate this into Clerky documents?

I've reviewed the stock agreements of three YC companies (one fairly recent) and they're close but not nearly identical to these documents. In particular, none of the plans I reviewed had triggers (but perhaps those are saved for C-levels).

The agreements don't leave room for non-uniform vesting (e.g. 10/20/30/40, which takes many lines to write), which is nice. In my experience, the only employees who appreciate those grants create as little value as the execs who think it incentivizing to award them.

This is great. I've added it to my startup onboarding guide blog post (which already has Clerky as an immensely helpful service): https://goeric.quora.com/Startup-Onboarding-Guide

The big question with all of this is, what value does stock have if the odds of seeing an exit seem to be shrinking substantially?

Having the optional clauses laid out is really nice for founders... And I like the table that spells out all of the parameters of the grants—very employee friendly.

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