[hatred]

I couldn't understand the part about an employee and loosing my job. Are you saying that they won't be able to sell their equity even at a steep discount in 90 days? Even, if they incur a loss of ~30-40% over the current prevailing price; it would still be a fortune. They can easily do that to save on the tax or did you mean something else?

[sleepychu]

1) They're worried they'll be fired to make the IPO work.

2) They're worried the value of their options will drop out before they have the option to exercise them.

[wpietri]

And I would add that in situations like this, employees should be very careful assuming that they'll get a price anything like what the most recent investors are getting.

Check out Table 2 here, down on page 45:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2955455

It uses Square as an example. The headline valuation price from their E round suggests that a share of stock was worth $15.46. But later investors can have all sorts of preferences. Common stock, though, is valued at $5.62.

As people who were here for the last bubble know, this is exacerbated when valuations dip. I know a number of people who worked their asses off for companies that got sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. But the employees saw nothing, because investors get paid first.

[thisisit]

Well, let's use the SNAP example which has been quoted above.

They went public earlier this year. With burgeoning balance sheet they have to fire people:

https://www.businessinsider.in/Snap-hit-with-more-layoffs-pl...

[adjkant]

To be fair, 18 / 2000 is very small and hardly a dent - the layoffs came because they are decreasing the rate of recruiting, which is still notable but is not laying off engineers (yet anyways). If Uber wanted to make IPO and were pressed for money, a slowing of hiring would not be enough.