YC Startup Talks: Startup Equity with Compound (YC S19)

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Nice to meet you all! My name is Jordan. I'm one of the founders of Compound. Today, I'm very excited to chat with you about my hatred of personal finance.

So, I hate finance more, or as much as most people, perhaps. You know, many years ago when I started the company, I just wanted to build something fun and impactful and kind of work with my friends. Meanwhile, I was being thrown all these acronyms, these like fancy words that I didn't understand. My friends convinced me to write this blog post all about equity compensation.

So, I wrote this essay that kind of mapped out what these different acronyms meant. I went from reading engineering code to reading the tax code. I published it on Hacker News on the internet. Lots of people came to me with all these complicated, boring adult tasks. They were like, “Help me!” I was like, “Well, certainly there's someone else out there in the world who you could go get help with that's like a real adult professional.”

I went and tried to meet those people. They were trying to sell me golfing; they were sending me LinkedIn messages. I was like, “Certainly there's a better way to do this.” That's why we built Compound. We're a wealth manager specifically designed for tech people. We work with clients across many of the best companies in the world, and we're super excited to help them manage their money, file their taxes, borrow money, and track their assets.

Today, we're talking about perhaps my favorite topic in the world, which is equity compensation. I was super lucky to be able to bring on someone that I really admire who has gone through both the ups and downs of different startups. You know, equity has become a big part of their life, which is really, really powerful.

So, I'm very excited to be working with Christina here today. Christina, would it be helpful maybe for you to give a quick introduction of yourself, and then we'll dive into the kind of agenda for today?

Sure! I joined First Round Capital earlier this year, but the 12 years prior to that, I've basically been working in startup after startup. Most recently, I was at Notion, leading our platform and partnerships teams. Before that, I was at Stripe, leading a new business unit. I joined Stripe in 2012 when it was quite small, and then two small startups before that.

So, broadly, yeah, I've just spent a lot of time in startups. I've been very pleased personally with the outcome of my startup equity. I think if people learn a lot more about it, they can be far more educated in terms of the decisions that they make.

Totally, and thank you again for spending the time here. Christina, like I said, is someone I've learned a lot from, and I think all of you would be able to as well. You can hear me say this stuff's important, and that will only go so far. But Christina is perhaps living proof that thinking about this stuff can make a really big difference towards your long-term future.

So, my goals for today, to kind of make them as explicit as possible, are as follows: Christina spent a long time at Stripe, so I like to say that we are trying to increase the GDP of everyone on this call. We want to make sure that everyone on this call walks away a bit smarter.

First and foremost, I want to make sure you care about your equity. By being on this call, you're already most of the way there, so thank you for doing that. You should thank yourself because you're doing an adult, grown-up thing today by taking control of your finances.

The second thing is, I want to make sure that you walk away with an understanding of some of the key terms, you know, some of those acronyms that may scare you. That alphabet soup of different words that you may not understand regarding joining a company or leaving a company, really everything you have to know kind of in between.

Then the third part is, I want to apply this in the real world, and you know, spend some time with Christina and Max is a...