1

Best websites to help evaluate startup offers?

Profile picture
Mid-Level Software Engineer at Taro Community6 months ago

Hello! Are there any websites to assist with evaluating startup offers (e.g. salary and equity)? Pave and Carta are focused on providing benchmarks for the offer-givers, not the offer-receivers. Levels.fyi seems interesting, but I'm not sure how much I can trust it?

Is it possible to just use Pave / Carta without paying for it?

Thanks!

72
3

Discussion

(3 comments)
  • 2
    Profile picture
    Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
    6 months ago

    Evaluating startup offers against other offers from the same startup is tricky as the data set is small and the receiving engineers need to report them. So unless you can hack into a data source used by the company, that seems rough.

    When it comes to comparing against the broader market, I just compare the offer against FAANG bands:

    • Base salary - This one's easy, tit-for-tat.
    • Equity - This one is much harder. You need to get the strike price + FMV and then do math to figure out the value of the options on paper. You also have to consider factors like vesting schedule and how quickly the options expire if you were to leave the company.

    When it comes to evaluating the overall strength of a startup, I recommend this: "How to evaluate a startup?"

    We gave a big talk on understanding comp overall as well: [Masterclass] Understanding And Optimizing Your Pay In Tech

    • 1
      Profile picture
      Mid-Level Software Engineer [OP]
      Taro Community
      6 months ago

      Amazing - thank you!

  • 1
    Profile picture
    Entry-Level Software Engineer [SDE 1] at Amazon
    6 months ago

    I found this article pretty helpful when it come to evaluating startup offers
    https://www.vinayiyengar.com/job-guide/

A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model.
Startups291 questions