Designing an Employee Stock Option Plan : A Practical Approach for the Entrepreneurial Company

Rating:
Summary: Totally Worthless!
Review: This book masquerades as a comprehensive guide to developing a stock option plan. In truth, it is a very basic overview of some of the topics surrounding stock option plans. When it attempts to walk through how one would actually go about creating a plan, it uses a hypothetical company and an executive named "Charlie". Sadly, whenever Charlie comes to difficult questions, no answer is given. For example, when discussing the question of valuing stock in a private company, the author's answer is to hire an outside consultant....Gee thanks! Beyond the single basic example give, no discussion of how or why certain decisions are to be made and rationalized. Another great example of this is in determining the number of shares to grant to employees and management. The answer given in the case study is that Charlie had "no process to determine these numbers"....wow, really insightful advice.....No plan at all, so when the executives ask you how you came up with the grant allocations, you can just tell them that you winged it, just like Charlie.

As you can tell, the authors couldnt even tackle simple issues like how many shares to grant, or the appropriate strike price,
and this is not even to mention REAL issues like compensating employees whose options are underwater. I guess Charlie didn't have this problem. I am totally embarassed to have bought this book, save your money and search the web for real-world advice.