Startup employees can now benchmark equity for the first time | Louis Velazquez - Official Website, Entrepreneur, Finance, Technology

When a startup employee sits across from a recruiter and receives an offer, one part of the package has always been almost impossible to evaluate on the spot.

The salary is straightforward. The benefits are standard. The equity grant is something else entirely. Twenty thousand options. Is that competitive? Compared to what?

Companies have always been able to answer that question. They buy benchmarking data. But the person on the other side of the table, the one deciding whether to sign, has generally had very little to go on.

The equity information gap startup employees have negotiated around

Salary transparency has improved dramatically over the past decade. Levels.fyi,Glassdoor and LinkedIn have made it possible for most workers to check a salary offer against real market data before accepting.

Several states now require employers to post pay ranges on job listings. The information asymmetry that once defined salary negotiations has narrowed considerably.

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Equity has not followed the same path. Unlike salary, equity data has never been subject to transparency laws. And unlike stock compensation at public companies, startup option grants don’t appear in any filing.

The result is that employees at private startups have been negotiating one of the most consequential parts of their compensation package largely blind, while the companies they’re negotiating with have access to detailed benchmarking data through paid services.

This is the gap that a growing number of tools are trying to close. One of the more notable recent attempts is Equitybee Benchmark, a free tool that lets U.S. startup employees compare equity grants across roles, seniority levels, departments, and company stages.

The data behind it come from more than 9,000 verified option grants across over 2,500 U.S. startups, from Seed through Pre-IPO.

Unlike salary surveys, these are not self-reported estimates. They are verified grants, addressing what a blog post from Aption described as the core problem for early employees: They “rarely see the full capitalization table, the liquidation preferences sitting ahead of them, or the precise terms of the last priced round.”

What the data behind Equitybee Benchmark actually measure

Option count alone tells you almost nothing useful. The same 20,000 options can be worth wildly different amounts, depending on the company’s valuation at the time they were granted.

Equitybee Benchmark addresses this by comparing grants using Fair Market Value at the time the grant was issued. Options multiplied by FMV per share gives a grant value. Ten thousand options at a $10 FMV equals a $100,000 grant. That is the number you can actually compare across companies and roles.

From there, the data can show how grants differ by department, seniority, and company stage.

Do engineers consistently receive larger grants than marketers? How much equity typically increases with seniority? Do later-stage companies grant differently from early-stage ones? These are questions that HR teams have always been able to answer internally. Employees have had to guess.

The tool is deliberate about what it does not claim to do. It doesn’t predict whether a company will exit. It doesn’t tell you what your options will be worth. It can’t, because nobody can.

What it does provide is the same market context that companies have always accessed, applied to the employee side of the negotiation for once.

For decades the information asymmetry in startup comp ran one direction.

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Four moments when equity data changes a decision

Knowing where an equity grant stands relative to the market matters most in a handful of specific situations.

Evaluating a new job offer is the obvious one. But it also applies when preparing for a promotion conversation where equity is part of the ask, when weighing whether to leave one company for another, or when trying to make sense of grants already held without any external reference point.

The timing of tools like this is not incidental. IPO activity has been picking up after a quiet stretch, and the AI hiring wave has pushed startup compensation to levels not seen in years.

Equity is accounting for a larger share of total startup pay than it has been in some time. The pressure on employees to evaluate grants accurately has increased at exactly the moment when doing so has become slightly more possible.

For decades, the information asymmetry in startup comp ran in one direction. Companies had the data. Employees had a hunch.

Salary transparency laws and crowdsourced salary tools have started closing that gap on the cash side of the equation. Equity is the last major piece that hasn’t had a public market for its information.

That is slowly starting to change, and for startup employees negotiating one of the most valuable and least understood parts of their compensation, the direction of that change matters.