I've never been a huge fan of the 1 year cliff for early employees, myself being one. I've been looking over some terms of a new agreement, and it seemed to be that it would make sense for there to be a vesting trigger clause based around receiving investment, perhaps over a given criteria to move things a little more towards "fair" from the employees point of view.
Typical equity agreements have the 1 year cliff for 25% of the employees shares to be vested followed by 1/36 each month or 1/12 each quarter. It seems to me that the 1 year cliff doesn't make much sense for the earliest employees, if they've done enough after 6 months that the company takes in a round of funding (1M or more) that they should immediately vest to that point and start the standard vesting clock at that point.
Has anyone ever seen a clause like this in their agreements, or insisted on one? Am I far off base for thinking this shouldn't be unheard of?
Typical equity agreements have the 1 year cliff for 25% of the employees shares to be vested followed by 1/36 each month or 1/12 each quarter. It seems to me that the 1 year cliff doesn't make much sense for the earliest employees, if they've done enough after 6 months that the company takes in a round of funding (1M or more) that they should immediately vest to that point and start the standard vesting clock at that point.
Has anyone ever seen a clause like this in their agreements, or insisted on one? Am I far off base for thinking this shouldn't be unheard of?