[geoffharcourt]

Pre-IPO the venture is likely not profitable, so you'd be getting a share of zero. Companies that are VC-backed are going to be held to an expectation of a big payoff, and will be in general discouraged from offering incentives that uncouple employee incentives from an exit. If I understand this right, it's part of why founders have started to be allowed to sell some of their vested shares at funding events, it gives them some more financial runway as the company's timeline stretches out (you don't want the optics of the CEO of your $50m series C to be eating peanut butter and ramen, etc.)

I do think profit sharing would be a good lever for a bootstrapped company that is already profitable and wants to give key employees skin in the game.

[beagle3]

Note GP asked about revenue sharing, whereas you discuss profit sharing. That's not the same thing.

Salespeople and sales partners are often compensated with a sales based commission, which is a revenue sharing scheme. It's common and expected, and practiced everywhere there's deal flow.

Technical people can rarely prove "ownership" of revenue, so they can't leverage that in negotiation and are left with "general" ownership through options or RSUs or whatever. There's nothing inherent or natural (or unnatural) about it. If money flows through you, you can usually demand to keep some of it. If it doesn't, you usually can't.

[Mauricebranagh]

And sales commissions are very rarely contractual and open to massive fiddling by the employer.

[eternalban]

> Technical people can rarely prove "ownership" of revenue

Maybe we geeks should let the sales teams run Powerpoint presentations instead of the actual product to address that misunderstanding.