Liquidity For Your Shares/Options: 5 Things You Need To Know

A Need For Liquidity, You’re An Early Stage Employee

As companies are staying private longer than ever, the need for pre-IPO liquidity has become increasingly important for early shareholders, especially early employees.

Today, there are circa 1200 unicorn companies globally, with an aggregate valuation of $3.8tn. These are companies generating significant revenue. Ten or so years ago these companies would have gone public, allowing employees to access liquidity. Today however, with the abundance venture capital available there’s less of an incentive to go public, which mean some employees are stuck waiting upwards of ten years for liquidity. Considering the current market environment, and the broader financial considerations weighing on us all, keeping morale high may require benefiting from your equity.

In this Linqto Learn we will be deep diving into how you, an employee with shares / options, can achieve liquidity in a smooth way. We will also be digging into what the various flavors of incentive compensation at startups are: restricted stock, incentive stock options (ISOs) and non-qualified stock options. We will walk you through how stock options work, tax implications, correct timing and how you can sell your shares. Think of this as a liquidity 101 learning session.

To guide us through this session we’ve invite Dan Idkowski, partner at LvIUp Ventures, and Ben Kromnick, managing partner at LvIUp Ventures. Dan is a 5x founder, VC, inventor and quant guy. He has deep expertise in fintech, wealthtech and deeptech and over seven years of operations experience engaging with dozens of different tier 1 venture funds. Ben Kromnick is a product and strategy leader with experience building at massive organizations and scaling Startups across the Fintech, Healthtech, Collaboration, Insuretech, Wearables and AI industries. He works at the confluence of major social change and the application of big data/ AI to impact our world. More on them both below.