Comment by itake
did the employees come out ok equity-wise from the spac merger?
did the employees come out ok equity-wise from the spac merger?
No, generally not. 23andMe only ever did ISOs prior to the SPAC merger, not RSUs, and they had a quite high strike price. There was a 6 month insider lock up against selling, so by the time most of us could sell, the price had tanked. By the time I was able to sell, the share price was so low that only my oldest options from when I started at the company in 2014 were in the money.
I ended up making a few 10s of thousands. Not the 100s it would have taken to compensate for the low pay for all those years. And I probably did better than most by selling what I could when I could. Most people weren't in the money at all.
Maybe if you timed the market perfectly you could have done well. I don't know that anyone did.
I did not, but that’s because I joined late and had a high strike price. I also turned down a second market offer to sell at around $15/share. Oops.
Many people sold during internal private liquidity events, and they did well. If you joined early you did well.