Hi! I'm Beth, a developer from the Long-Term Stock Exchange. We built TLDR Options to help job seekers feel less in the dark when considering an offer from a startup.
I've been a developer for over a decade, but when I was looking at my first-ever start up job I felt like an idiot. I had gotten equity before, sure, but always at a public company. Startup equity had at least six extra dimensions of uncertainty and I didn't even know which scenarios I should be considering! Even after educating myself and asking experienced folks I knew for the right questions to ask, I got as far as figuring out that it's a power law with a median value of zero and a mean value strictly greater than zero, and basically gave up there.
TLDR Options was born of the realization that I didn't need a perfect answer: I just needed access to intuition around possible outcomes. People who already know about things like exit sizes and dilution and valuation growth have that implicitly, but for newbies like me the most common answer we get is an only-half-joking '$0!' You can't get an accurate answer without understanding the ins and outs of valuation and exit scenarios and preferences, so instead of "accurate" TLDR Options just aspires to provide a more useful answer than '$0'.
Looking forward to hearing what y'all think!
Runway