Shares and equity at Feather

At Feather, transparency is one of our core values. We decided to pour our equity grid publicly to make it fair for everybody. Current employees can check if their equity package is aligned with their peers, and candidates can benchmark what they will get.

What is equity? Equity is a way to compensate our employees by giving them a percentage of the company. Simply put, if the company is doing very well and gets sold or on the public market (IPO) or gets acquired*, owning a certain percentage of the company will allow you to cash it out and earn money.

To keep this article short, we won’t explain what equity is, how it works, etc. There are countless articles on the topic - one that goes particularly straight to the point is Equity for Software Engineer

How we do equity at Feather

Equity grid

Everybody at Feather gets offered equity in the form of options when they receive an offer from us. In the same fashion as our salary grids being public, we’re also making our options grid public.

This follows a formula that we got by reverse engineering some of the salary/shares for other companies that are online (e.g., Equity User Guide from Alan):

f(x) = -27764 * x + 2.3 * x^2 -0.0000686 * x^3 - 0.000000000885 * x^4 - -3.1E-15 * x^5

Terms

Our shares are always structured the same for every single employee:

• Four-year vesting, one-year cliff: You earn your shares over four years. If you leave before one year, you lose everything. If you leave after that—except for bad reasons like fraud—you keep what you earned. It should be standard—it often isn’t.
• The shares are actually options on shares, not actual shares - this gives you tax benefits (in particular in Germany) and downside protection in case Feather doesn’t work out. Standard.
• If we get sold, you’re immediately fully vested. Amazing. You’ll only have to stick around if you like where Feather is going.

We’ve attached the details of our share option plan here. It’s the same for everyone. If we make any other improvements to it, which applies to all past, present, and future option holders, we welcome comments. Feel free to compare it with your current plan.

Feather option agreement - May 2024

Viewing your equity

We created a dashboard for everybody at Feather to visualize their options plan. The dashboard looks like the following:

When can I sell my shares?

You can sell your shares during a selling event: Feather goes on the public market (through an IPO), or Feather gets acquired*. 

Historically, during fundraising, we allowed Feather employees who stayed more than two years in the company to sell up to 40k€ of their options.

*Notes on acquisition. If Feather gets acquired because it is very successful, you will make money; if Feather is being acquired for cheap because we’re about to go bankrupt, it’s unlikely that your shares will be worth anything. This is based on liquidation preference