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Equity is one of the most powerful instruments available to a tech founder. It aligns incentives, attracts entrepreneurial talent, and creates long-term ownership thinking across the organisation.
Yet when the discussion turns to the size of the option pool, many companies default to market conventions like “10% is standard.”
Market references can be helpful, but copying a percentage without linking it to your hiring roadmap, financing strategy and growth milestones is rarely optimal.
Your option pool sits on the cap table alongside founder and investor shares. Every percentage point impacts dilution, control, future negotiations and ultimately value at exit. Getting it “approximately right” is not enough. It needs to be structurally aligned with your growth plan.
An incorrectly sized option pool has tangible consequences:
Rather than looking at the option pool as a static percentage, we can view it as a dynamic strategic instrument that evolves with your company’s maturity, risk profile and funding trajectory. Just as you align your commercial investments with your growth targets, your equity allocation should reflect your human capital roadmap.
Rather than using a top-down percentage, we like to take a bottom-up approach, So, instead of asking, “What percentage should our pool be?”, the better question is: “Who do we need to hire to reach our next value inflection point?”
A structured bottom-up analysis considers three key variables:
Early employees accept significant uncertainty: product risk, funding risk, and execution risk. Equity compensates for that risk and should reflect company maturity.
Typically, early key hires deserve a larger share. As your company matures and risk decreases, the balance shifts. Later hires are often more “cash-heavy” and “equity-light.”If this dynamic is not modelled explicitly:
Equity is not a “one-size-fits-all” solution. A CTO successor requires a different allocation than a junior account manager. Building the pool role-by-role forces clarity:
This prevents reactive equity grants and preserves flexibility for truly strategic hires.
An option pool should be sized for a defined period, typically until the next financing round, plus a decent buffer.
This means modelling:
Without modelling this explicitly, companies can face higher effective dilution than originally assumed.
Even a technically perfect option pool loses effectiveness if your team does not understand its value.
In the startup world, we often talk about “perceived value.” If a candidate only sees a percentage without context, it remains an abstract number that may or may not be worth something one day.
Candidates and employees do not evaluate “0.4%” in isolation. They need context:
Equity becomes meaningful when it is embedded in a coherent narrative about company trajectory and value creation.
Founders often carry silent concerns about whether they are structuring their company in a way that will scale, not only commercially, but organisationally and financially.
A thoughtfully designed option pool demonstrates:
Setting up your equity management can be complex, but it doesn't have to be frustrating..
To help founders approach this process with precision, we have developed an Option Pool Calculator. This is not a simple calculation model, but a strategic tool that forces you to think role-by-role about your team structure, your hiring plan, and the associated dilution.
Want to stop guessing and start planning? Want to be sure that your stock plan will stand up to the test?
Get the Option Pool Calculator here
If you would like to explore this topic further and discover what F.INSTITUTE can do for your organisation, feel free to get in touch. We would be happy to discuss your goals.