At Quora we decided not to have a higher "minimum service period" aside from the standard 1 year cliff. The rationale is that the vesting cliff is what everyone is expecting as the minimum. If a company wants to have a higher period before someone can leave and retain their stock, they should just increase the cliff to that length of time to make it fully transparent.
That's a fair point, but cliffs are more severe than exercise windows. Many employees still get to keep some of their equity in a 90 day exit window scenario. I think Kupor modeled it at about a third of vested shares on average.[1]
More mature startups may be able to simply abolish the long-term incentive that the 90 day window provides, but I suspect younger (<30 employee) startups need added turnover protection. Perhaps backloaded vesting would be a more comparable replacement? Transparent, predictable, fair, and not as harsh as cliffs. You keep what you vest, but 70% of it vests in years 3-4.
[1] (Although there's certainly unfair variability based on personal financial circumstances in that average.)
> Do employees want to join companies with the expectation that if any of these things happen at any point over the course of 10 years before an IPO, they end up with nothing?
This is a great thing to highlight. There's the company and the opportunity and then there's all that random stuff that you only understand after a decade in the industry.
That is incorrect. My 2000 stock plan from Lime Wire had 10 year exercise period from grant. Completely agree with you about all of it but you weren't the first one not by some margin.
The unusual number of complaints on this thread were actually because of a bug causing a bad experience. This was our fault and it has been fixed.
We don't mind the change of link - we just want knowledge shared on Quora to get to as many people as possible and we don't mind if it happens on other sites. But I wanted to let you guys know that this was a bug and the behavior is back to normal (nothing with share=1 will ever require viewers to sign in / trigger this level of complaints). There can be so much negativity here that it can be hard to tell the difference between general hate (as radmuzom suspected) and a real problem, but in this case it was a real problem.
We don't care about signup counts, only about real engagement. Most people have no problem with registering, and the engagement from logged in users is so much higher that it more than offsets the small minority of people who don't want to register.
The copy/paste issue on iOS is a bug, and should be fixed within the next week. Sorry about that. We want people to copy and share content out of Quora far and wide, which is why our terms of service gives people an unusual amount of legal permission to copy and reuse content. See: http://www.quora.com/about/tos
