[jzila]

Sam Altman talked about this in his Employee Equity post: http://blog.samaltman.com/employee-equity. "The idea is to grant options that are exercisable for 10 years from the grant date, which should cover nearly all cases (i.e. the company will probably either go public, get acquired, or die in that time frame, and so either the employee will have the liquidity to exercise or it won’t matter.)"

Of course, that isn't advice specific to your situation, but at least it shows you a general direction you can use to guide your thinking. There are also plenty of resources online that talk about the potential tax consequences of various exit scenarios.

[optionadvice]

Thanks for the link! Reading now