Something to readCompensation
Rewarding talent
A venture firm's free handbook for founders on stock options, worth reading from the other side
Why it’s worth your time
If you've wondered where the number on your equity grant came from, Index Ventures' founder handbook shows the company's side of the table. The venture firm published the playbook it recommends to founders, and much of it is just as useful from the employee's chair. Seeing how one firm tells founders to set grants can make your own easier to understand and to ask about.
How a startup might size your stock option grant
The essay · 150 min · Free
How to get it
Opens their site. We don’t copy it here; we’d rather they get the read.
- Start with the chapters on grants and leavers.
You can skip the country-by-country tax review unless it's your country. The sections on staff grants below executive level, grants for high performers and promotions, how to handle leavers' options, and the dos and don'ts for explaining grants to employees are the ones about employees' own grants.
- Write down four facts about your grant.
Your level, the number of options, the strike price, and what happens to vested options if you leave. If any are missing from your paperwork, ask whoever handles equity at your company.
Good moments for this: before you sign an offer with optionsright after a promotionwhen you're thinking about leaving a startup
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
The grant tables are Index's own recommendations, which it describes as somewhat higher than European norms at the time, and US practice differs in places. Your company may use another firm's benchmarks, or none.
What might make this harder
Check what's different first: stage, valuation, function, country. Then ask how grants are set at your level, framed as wanting to understand the system rather than as a complaint.
Questions people ask
What is Index Ventures' Rewarding Talent?
A free handbook for startup founders, mostly in Europe, written by Dominic Jacquesson for the venture firm Index Ventures, on designing stock option plans: how much of the company employees should own, who gets how much by role and level, vesting, leavers and explaining options to staff. It draws on cap tables from 73 companies in Index's European portfolio and more than 4,000 option grants at over 200 startups in Europe and the US, along with interviews with founders and executives and a survey of European startups.
How many stock options should I get at a startup?
It depends on the company's stage, your level, your function and your country. Index recommends sizing staff grants as a percentage of base salary, higher for engineering and product and for more senior roles. Treat its tables as one firm's recommendation, not a standard.
Do you get more stock options when you're promoted?
Index recommends that founders top up a promoted employee's options to match what a new hire in the same role would receive. Not every company does, so it's a fair question to ask.
What happens to stock options when you leave a startup?
In the US, the handbook says, leavers usually get 90 days to exercise what's vested before it's forfeited, though some companies allow longer. In Europe practice varies; almost half of the European startups it surveyed let leavers keep vested options but not exercise them until an exit.
What it says, and how it holds up
Rewarding Talent argues that a grant should come from a formula, built on your level, your function and how far along the company is, rather than from a one-off call about each hire. It's open that this is a recommendation: in Europe, it says, founders often have little benchmark data and only a gut feeling to go on, and the handbook sets out to close that gap. Index Ventures, which backs startups in Europe and the US, released it in December 2017 and later expanded it. It was researched and written by Dominic Jacquesson, Index's director of talent at the time.
For an employee, the useful parts are the recommendations. In its model, staff below executive level get grants sized as a percentage of base salary, and its default table spreads widely: from 75 percent of salary for an engineering director down to 5 percent for an individual contributor in sales. High performers can be given multiples of the base grant, and the handbook suggests letting new joiners trade some salary for options at a fixed ratio.
It's written for founders, and it argues openly for giving employees more ownership and better terms when they leave. By its own account that makes it friendlier to employees than more traditional European advice, though it's written from an investor's side of the table. The country scores and tax rules date from its last update and may have moved since.
At a public company paying in restricted stock units, or anywhere equity stops below a certain level, the grant tables won't tell you much. There the more useful documents are your own company's level guide and whatever it says about how pay is decided, if that's something you can find out. This explains how things usually work; it isn't financial, tax or legal advice for your situation.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.