MBA Mondays - Business 101 for startups by Fred Wilson

M & A Case Studies: Feedburner

This MBA Mondays M&A case study is about the effect that stock option acceleration provisions have on M&A transactions. I am reblogging a blog post that Feedburner founder/CEO Dick Costolo (now Twitter CEO) wrote in the wake of the acquisition of Feedburner by Google. This post is still live on the web at it's original location. While the names are fictional, the situations are not. It's a really good read and addresses a whole host of issues that you will face as you think about stock option acceleration for your team.

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Question number 1 comes from an invisible Irish gentleman named Bernie in Wichita. Bernie writes, "Can you explain options acceleration? And when would I want to use it? And when wouldn't I? And what's single trigger vs. double trigger acceleration and how do you feel about those kinds of things?"

Those are great questions Bernie! Hopefully, I can at least get you to realize there's a lot to think about here. Let's dive right in.

Most options plans for your employees have a vesting schedule the defines how the options vest (ie, when the employee can exercise them). Vesting schedules for tech startups all generally look like a four year vesting period, with 25% of the total options grant vesting on a one year cliff (ie, nothing vests for a year and then 25% of the options vest on the 1 year anniversary), and then the rest of the options vest at 1/48th of the total options every month for the next 36 months.

Now let's say you've got this classic vesting schedule and you hire somebody named Bobby Joe after you've been in business for one month, and he gets an options grant equal to 1% of the total outstanding shares. He works hard at your company for 11 months, after which your company is acquired for an ungodly sum of money. The acquirer decides that they were buying your company because of it's cool logo and they don't need any actual employees so they are all terminated effective immediately.

Bobby Joe's options are worth how much? If you answered "Bubkas", "Zero", "nothing" or laughed at the question, you are correct. Although Bobby Joe has worked at the company for almost the entire life of the company, he gets nothing and the person that started 30 days before him gets 25% of their total options value. Doesn't seem fair. Or as Bobby Joe would undoubtedly say "I'm upset, and I will exact my revenge on you at some later date in a compelling and thorough fashion"

Enter acceleration. Acceleration in an options plan can cause vesting to accelerate based on some event, such as an acquisition. For example, you might have a clause in your plan that states that 25% of all unvested options accelerate in the event the company is acquired.

If Bobby Joe had acceleration like this, he's happier. He may still not be as happy as the person hired a month before him who also accelerates and now has 50% vested (the first year cliff and the extra 25% acceleration), but it sure feels a lot better to be Bobby Joe in this scenario.

That brings us to single trigger, double trigger, full acceleration, partial acceleration, etc.

We'll start with full vs. partial acceleration. Full acceleration means that if the accelerating event happens, 100% of unvested options are vested and the employee is fully vested. If you started your job last Wednesday, the board approved your options grant on Thursday with full acceleration, and the company was acquired on Friday, congratulations, you just vested 100% of your options....you are just as vested as Schmucky in Biz Dev who was employee number 2 and started 3 years and 10 months ago (although shmucky may of course have a larger total number of options than you).

Partial acceleration we already referred to; this is how we refer to vesting some remaining portion of unvested options, such as 25% of the remaining unvested options.

Ok so far? Good, we are coming to the fun part. Let's say you bootstrap your startup that's selling bootstraps on bootstrap.com for two years and then let's say you have a 20% options pool that was created as part of an A round financing. Over the next 6 months you hire a whole bunch of people, you allocate 15 percent of the options pool, and an acquirer comes along. Do you think the shareholders (common and preferred) are going to be more excited about full acceleration or partial acceleration? Full acceleration dilutes the shareholders 15%, whereas partial acceleration only dilutes the shareholders...well, partially. As a variation on this example, let's say you hired employee number 1 when you started bootstrapping and you allocate the same number of options to everybody. The guy who started last Tuesday is going to make just as much as employee number 1.