Index Ventures' playbook for rewarding talent with stock options
summary
Index Ventures compiles benchmarks from 22 countries, publishes a 150‑page playbook and a web app (optionplan.com) used ~150 unique users/day, and runs an advocacy campaign (not optional) for better tax and legal regimes. Findings: US late‑stage employee ownership ≈20% vs Europe ≈10%; typical seed ESOP starts at 10% and should top up each round; seed senior engineer grants 1–2%, mid 0.5%, junior 0.1–0.15%; execs ~1%, VPs ~0.5%. Recommends backloaded vesting to improve retention.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:40The key bottleneck to growth
- 5:07Ownership structure in startups
- 6:59Equity in Europe
- 8:40Government policy
- 10:00Mindset
- 11:43Benchmarks
- 13:37Difference between US and Europe
- 15:07Make everyone an owner
- 16:56Backload vesting
- 18:40Summary
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