• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Index Ventures launches web-app to help founders calculate employee stock options

September 15, 2021 by David Barret Leave a Comment

The ability to offer stock options is utterly essential to startups. They convince talented people to join when the startup is unlikely to be capable of matching the high salaries that larger, established tech firms can offer.

However, it’s a complex business developing a competitive stock option plan. Luckily, London-based VC Index Ventures today launches both a handy web app to calculate all this, plus new research into how startups are compensating their key hires across Europe and the US.

OptionPlan Seed, is a web-app for seed-stage founders designing ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Plans). 
The web app is based on Index’s analysis of seed-stage option grants, drawing on data from over 1,000 startups.

The web app covers a variety of roles; 6 different levels of allocation benchmarks; calculates potential financial upside for each team member (including tax); and adjusts according to policy frameworks in the US, Canada, Israel, Australia, and 20 European countries.

It also builds on the OptionPlan for Series A companies that Index launched a few years ago.

As part of its research for the new tool, Index said it found that almost all seed-stage employees receive stock options. However, while this reaches 97% of technical hires at seed-stage startups and 80% of junior non-technical hires for startups in the US, in Europe only 75% of technical hires receive options, dropping to 60% for junior non-technical hires.

That said, Index found stock option grant sizes are increasing, particularly among startups “with a lot of technical DNA, and weighted towards the Bay Area”. In less tech-heavy sectors such as e-commerce or content, grant sizes have not shifted much. Meanwhile, grants are still larger overall as seed valuations have grown in the last few years.

Index found the ESOP size is increasing at seed stage, following a faster rate of hiring, and larger grants per employee. Index recommends an ESOP size at seed stage is set at 12.5% or 15%, rather than the more traditional 10% in order to retain and attract staff.

The research also found seed fundraise sizes and valuations have doubled, while valuations have risen by 2.5x, in Europe and the US. 


Additionally, salaries at seed have “risen dramatically” with average salaries rising in excess of 60%. Senior tech roles at seed-stage startups in the US now earn an average $185,000 salary, a 68% increase over 3 years, and can rise to over $220,000. But in Europe, the biggest salary increases have been for junior roles, both technical and non-technical.



That said, Index found that “Europe’s technical talent continues to have a compensation gap” with seed-stage technical employees in Europe still being paid 40-50% less on average than their US counterparts. Indeed, Index found this gap had actually widened since 2018, “despite a narrowing of the gap for non-technical roles”.


Index also found variations in salaries across Europe are “much wider than the US”, reflecting high-cost hubs like London, versus lower-cost cities like Bucharest or Warsaw.

The war for talent is now global, with the compensation gap for technical hires narrowing to 20-25% compared to the US.


Index’s conclusion is that “ambitious seed founders in Europe should raise the bar in terms of who they hire, particularly in technical roles” as well as aiming for more experienced and higher-caliber candidates, larger fundraises to be competitive on salaries.

Source Link Index Ventures launches web-app to help founders calculate employee stock options

David Barret
David Barret

Related posts:

  1. Britain’s Raab, in Qatar, says need to engage with Taliban on Afghanistan
  2. U.S. top general secretly called China twice as Trump term ended -report
  3. Haiti PM fires prosecutor seeking charges against him in president’s killing
  4. Dollar drifts as soft inflation raises taper timing questions

Filed Under: News

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

  • Uranus And Neptune May Not Be “Ice Giants” But The Solar System’s First “Rocky Giants”
  • COVID-19 Can Alter Sperm And Affect Brain Development In Offspring, Causing Anxious Behavior
  • Why Do Spiders’ Legs Curl Up Like That When They’re Dead?
  • “Dead Men’s Fingers” Might Just Be The Strangest Fruit On The Planet
  • The South Atlantic’s Giant Weak Spot In The Earth’s Magnetic Field Is Growing
  • Nearly Half A Century After Being Lost, “Zombie Satellite” LES-1 Began Sending Signals To Earth
  • Extinct In the Wild, An Incredibly Rare Spix’s Macaw Chick Hatches In New Hope For Species
  • HUNTR/X Or Giant Squid? Following Alien Claims, We Asked Scientists What They Would Like Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS To Be
  • Flat-Earthers Proved Wrong Using A Security Camera And A Garage
  • Earth Breaches Its First Climate Tipping Point: We’re Moving Into A World Without Coral Reefs
  • Cheese Caves, A Proposal, And Chance: How Scientists Ended Up Watching Fungi Evolve In Real Time
  • Lab-Grown 3D Embryo Models Make Their Own Blood In Regenerative Medicine Breakthrough
  • Humans’ Hidden “Sixth Sense” To Be Mapped Following $14.2 Million Prize – What Is Interoception?
  • Purple Earth Hypothesis: Our Planet Was Not Blue And Green Over 2.4 Billion Years Ago
  • Hippos Hung Around In Europe 80,000 Years Later Than We Thought
  • Officially Gone: Slender-Billed Curlew, Once-Widespread Migratory Bird, Declared Extinct By IUCN
  • Watch: Rare Footage Captures Freaky Faceless Cusk Eels Lurking On The Deep-Sea Floor
  • Watch This Funky Sea Pig Dancing Its Way Through The Deep Sea, Over 2,300 Meters Below The Surface
  • NASA Lets YouTuber Steve Mould Test His “Weird Chain Theory” In Space
  • The Oldest Stalagmite Ever Dated Was Found In Oklahoma Rocks, Dating Back 289 Million Years
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version