👋 Hi, it’s CJ Gustafson and welcome to Mostly Metrics, my weekly newsletter where I unpack how the world’s best CFOs and business experts use metrics to make better decisions.

Giving myself a pep talk each morning

Welcome to our May series on Employee Equity.

  • Part 1: What’s a 409a Valuation (TODAY!)

  • Part 2: Paying (Avoiding?) Taxes on your Equity (NEXT WEEK!)

  • Part 3: Getting RICH off Secondary Transactions

It’s crazy - when you enter the startup game there’s no “crash course” on employee equity. We essentially trade four years of our lives for an illiquid bet on a single stock that may make us extraordinarily wealthy. But we fail to understand the basic mechanics of these strange wealth instruments.

Two things I want to say at the start of this series:

  1. Employee equity is NOT too difficult for you to understand. You do NOT have to be a “finance person”. You ARE smart enough.

  2. It’s silly to just PUNT on this stuff because you don’t want to ask the “dumb” questions.

So fear not! I’ll ask (and answer!) them for you.

If you work at a startup but don't understand what a 409A valuation is, you might be leaving money on the table. Let's change that:

logo

Subscribe to our premium content to read the rest.

Become a paying subscriber to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content.

Upgrade

Your subscription unlocks:

  • In-depth “how to” playbooks trusted by the most successful CFOs in the world
  • Exclusive access to our private company financial benchmarks
  • Support a writer sharing +30,000 hours of on-the-job insights

Keep Reading