Chained to millions of dollars - how Uber holds the most valuable employees

Most employees dream of getting a major start-up option, but this does not always guarantee a bonus when they leave the company. Uber employees would argue with this - the startup made every effort to complicate the exit process for any of the employees.

Currently, Uber has about 6,700 employees, and the number of those who left in recent years is minimal by the standards of a major startup. The reason is simple - Uber has complicated the exit process for employees by issuing options for potentially large amounts.
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The scheme is quite ingenious - when issuing, say, 0.5% of shares as a bonus at the start and subsequent investments in the region of $ 11 million, as well as an estimated value of $ 60 million as of 2011, this block of shares would cost $ 300,000. With a capitalization increase of up to $ 60 billion, such a package of shares would increase in price to $ 299.7 million. But when leaving Uber, an employee is obliged to pay a tax of $ 119.8 million within 90 days. Moreover, the obligation to pay tax comes into force immediately after Uber.

For its part, Uber imposes restrictions on the sale of stakes in the third market, prohibiting the transfer of their shares to venture funds or to private investors.

“We went around a lot of Uber employees who started working in the company in the early stages, and most of them explored almost all the possibilities to get out of Uber and circumvent the need for payments.

Unfortunately, the position of Uber remains simple - if the leadership of a startup finds out about the transfer of shares, there will be serious consequences, ” sources told TechCrunch.

The company's position in this matter remains difficult because of the desire of Travis Kalanik to avoid any possibility of exerting pressure on the company's development vector. Moreover, this approach forces the best Uber employees to remain in the company, or to refuse options for hundreds of thousands of dollars or even more.

“If you have the opportunity to sell part of the shares, taking into account the payment of taxes in the amount of 40%, then this is one question. But if you can not, then you need to strive for greater income, or to abandon a very large stake. In most cases, you will remain, ”said one of the Uber employees, who, for understandable reasons, wished to remain anonymous.

The only way for such employees is to wait for the release of Uber to IPO, when the ban on the sale of shares should automatically dream. But amid a multitude of lawsuits, in some of which Uber agrees to payments in the amount of $ 100 million, they can worry about potential development problems. And this reduces the possibility of IPO in the near future.