Natalie Connor’s Post

Issuing Stock Options to My Team—Navigating Surprises Along the Way Continuing my startup journey, I want to share how I issued stock options to my team and the challenges I faced. The most crucial aspect of a startup is who you’re embarking on this journey with. Forming a strong, motivated team is vital, and stock options are a great tool to unite everyone around a common goal. I decided to grant options to everyone from the start, even junior specialists. Now, my team has five full-timers and three fractional C-level managers, all with options. First, an unpleasant surprise: To issue options from a U.S. company (I have a C-Corp in Delaware), you need a 409A valuation. I discovered that Carta.com’s paid plan is practically the only reliable option for startups, but it’s not cheap. Thankfully, I negotiated quarterly payments with them. On the positive side, issuing options was super easy via Carta without any lawyers. Their support staff also helped when needed. Deciding what percentage to grant was another challenge. To avoid over-allocation that could break the cap table, I did my own research—Googling, asking ChatGPT, and consulting the community—to determine appropriate percentages. My fractional C-level hires received options without a cliff and vesting over 12-18 months, similar to advisors since they have other commitments. Forming a management team with experienced people was crucial. For the core team—engineers and designers—I set a standard 1-year cliff and 4-year vesting. They receive retainers with median market salaries based on their location. Finally, issuing options isn’t tied to contracts or job offers—you need separate documents. I used templates from Stripe Atlas and adjusted them. Hope this helps if you’re building a team. I’ll share more as I learn. In the photo, I’m with Karina, my assistant and marketing manager, who—even as an intern—helped me navigate this journey and provided tremendous support. #StartupJourney #StockOptions #Artifici.me

Joining a startup environment is not for everyone.   You must be a ‘doer’ as much as you are a ‘leader’.   This may change over time but if setting up a new office or joining after an early round of funding, structures and teams are typically not as established as in traditional financial services businesses.   You must be comfortable enough to ‘change the paper in the printer’ (although that seems a bit dated these days!).   If you really are, then you must be able to demonstrate that on your CV and at interview.   Not being able to demonstrate this is a major turnoff.

Hey founders and dreamers! 🚀 Level Up Ventures has a special treat for you: exclusive in-person office hours with Shashi Srikantan in sunny Los Angeles, CA during the week of March 25th! ☀️ This is a fantastic opportunity to gain insights and network within the venture capital industry! 💼✨ If interested, please fill out our form here: https://lnkd.in/eeN2s-q7 Approval is required and slots are limited so please be sure to fill out a form today! #LevelUpVentures #Entrepreneurship #VentureCapital #Founders #UnderrepresentedFounders

* Big updates to share * Last March I embarked on an adventure to lead Member Experience for a seed-stage, professional network called Round. Our mission was to bring together senior product and engineering leaders with a desire to impact tech for good, and connect them to peers they could learn from. I’m really proud of the work our team did at Round. We tested new ways of connecting members online and in-person, created new Learning Sprint programming that helped dozens of members prepare for career transitions and lock down new roles, launched a more accessible “community tier” membership, dialed in our ideal customer persona and how we talked to them, and rebuilt our consumer-facing website from the ground up. We also faced many challenges - a shifting macroeconomic environment, HR department budget cuts and layoffs, a fragmented audience with varied needs and priorities, and sometimes conflicting signals from our members. Building startups is HARD. Almost exactly a year after I joined and countless experiments later, we decided that our stagnant growth wasn’t enough to justify continuing to work on the business. So we made the difficult decision to wind down, refund our customers, and return the remaining capital to investors. Every professional chapter provides immense learning opportunities, and I am grateful for all I learned during my time at Round. I’m also grateful for the relationships I built with our members and my hard-working colleagues. The experience reinforced my passion for taking businesses from zero to one, building community digitally and IRL, creating magical and connective experiences for consumers, and connecting people to jobs and opportunities that could be totally life-changing. After taking a short break and getting married (!!) I’m embarking on the next adventure. I’ve reopened my consulting practice and am excited to support Consumer startups/founders. If you (or a friend) is looking for help refining a user journey, making your product experience more magical, cultivating a community, or taking a new product to market - I’d love to connect! * For more about my work, link in comments* Thanks again to the Round team and excited to see what’s next for everyone Ryan Fuller, Erik Anderson Laura Gravley Matt Leedham, CPC Brian Jansen Mani Gill Michelene Wilkerson Emily Harrison Sawyer Kelly Diana Brea Marisa Samek <3 #startups #founder #product #community

Less than 20% of Gen Z work for a Start-up, yet 64% of Gen Z plan to start a business in future. Here’s why working at a Start-up is a career cheat code. 1. Instant responsibility: Welcome to the pool. There is no shallow end. Go and call a FTSE500 CEO. Pitch to them during your first week! Your pitch might be awkward and broken. You might not get the deal done. But there’s no chance you’d be trusted with this responsibility anywhere other than a Start-up. 2. Scrappy: Start-ups are all about breaking things (accidentally) and fixing them (on purpose.) Unlike multinationals, there isn’t a billion-dollar band aid to magic away any problems. Believe it or not, it’s a privilege to fix broken things. Only by fixing what is broken, can you truly understand why it broke in the first place. 3. Managers who invest in you: In my first week at Kular I met with managers from every single department. Start-ups actively encourage their early hires to take on leadership responsibility from the get-go. Just a month into my time here, I’m now fortunate to lead a team of 4 incredible SDRs. If you couldn’t already tell, I’m loving my time here at Kular. And if you want to know more about what we do, follow me. Maverick F. I’ll be subtly sharing secrets from one of the UK’s fastest growing tech start-ups. 🚀

I vow never to work as an employee in corporate America again and to become a successful entrepreneur, even if it kills me. "Your position has just been terminated." Yet, you may be wondering why I'm still sporting a slight smile. Well, some of you may know that I ventured on my own with my startup back in late 2020, founding ICAO Standard English®, and then pivoting in parallel with Modern Planners, LLC. At the same time, I was working a full-time job to fund both startups/businesses. This was to reduce overhead and avoid diluting my ventures further with unnecessary stakeholders. When the market shifted, I was poised to further my skill set by quickly immersing myself in software development, landing another job within the first three months. As I built the habit of using my time outside of work to build my own enterprise, I struggled with having to answer to someone other than the customer or potential client. Having to report to my superiors literally made my stomach churn each day. I will never forget walking into HR and the HR rep looking at me, then at my manager, and asking, "Wait, he's the manager!? And you are?" Even my surroundings didn’t accept the "demotion" I gave myself by taking on an intermediate role, even though I listed myself that way on my resume. That’s the power of starting your own business: You are the founder, HR, the IT developer, head of sales, and when it comes time to make a hard decision like working for someone else, you have the ability to reference yourself as such. Back to why I'm still smiling and optimistic: What my former employer doesn't know is that on my nights and weekends, I continued burning the midnight oil. Delving deeply into the realm of residential and commercial real estate with such vigor, I endured many sleepless nights. And it all paid off! I just landed my first deal with CashThisHouse.com—a major breakthrough in my efforts. Going from LinkedIn requests from C-suite evangelists inviting me to their C-only roundtables, virtually seated next to the likes of Dan Cockerell (Ex-Disney), to having a manager who was often mistaken for my subordinate, to now landing my first real estate venture—it's been quite the adventure, to say the least. Moral of the story: There is always a silver lining in the sky 🙂 #entrepreneur

I got into tech 8 years ago, and I started 3 businesses during that time - a software company with customers in over a dozen countries, a co-working center for startups that failed miserably (terrible idea, don’t do it), and a sales recruiting practice that was absorbed by RevsUp in 2022. Immensely proud of the work we’ve done at RevsUp. Not only have we made an impact with dozens of key hires at the startups we’ve served, we’re also the first company to take a wrecking ball to the industry’s archaic pricing model, and we’ve led from the front in integrating AI into the workflows of recruiting. Mark DeChant is an industry icon, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to have worked alongside him the past 2 years. The wealth management industry is evolving at light speed, and I’m fired up to join David J. Scranton, Barry C. Wheeles, MBA and the team at Sound Income Group in Fort Lauderdale in leading recruiting and new business development initiatives. 1 in 6 financial advisors have moved from a corporate firm to an independent model over the past 5 years, and that’s only accelerating. With an RIA with $2.8 billion in assets under management, and a world class FMO providing marketing, compliance and operational support, income-centered advisors have a true partner who’s committed to their growth. We’re going to do a lot of winning. I’ve gotten to know so many amazing founders and leaders in recent years, and those relationships won’t change, even with new mountains to climb. #LFG 🚀🚀🚀

I can’t believe it has already (and dare I say, only 🫢) been a month at Traba. Yes, the rumors are true — the people here are the real deal. After my experience as a founder and grinding at early-stage startups, I was unsure about being back in the office for 12+ hours a day, but the time truly flies by. I guess that's what happens when I get the privilege of hanging out with 100 of the 'smartest people in the room'. I’m incredibly bullish on Traba's future for two reasons: 1. 🥵 This isn't glamorous; it’s hard work. We’re in an old school industry with manual operations at the forefront. Think about in-person travel agencies before online booking took over. It will be a major unlock when technology disrupts the $50B light industrial staffing industry. 2. 🚀 People at Traba dream big. Every person here is fully bought in, leading to the hardest-working team I’ve ever seen. I believe the difference between a company with exponential growth and one with linear growth stems from the people who make it happen. A special thanks to Gail and Josh for helping me see Traba's potential. I’m excited to work alongside them and the rest of our incredibly talented team to build a disruptive product. 🔥 Also, we’re #hiring! If you’re up for the challenge, shoot me a message or tag a friend who is below. We’re looking for #designers, #PMs, and #engineers who have what it takes. Come solve the hard problems with us! - Shoutout to the awesome founders Mike and Akshay, my former coworkers Eliza, Austin, Mario, and Sterling for hyping me up, and to all of my friends & family for the support 💜

When to start hiring as a #founder... Disclaimer: I don't really know the answers here. Lots of founders have 100X more experience #scaling from garage to IPO. I don't. But I've been deeply *feeling* something for weeks and it feels worth airing out. At my first startup, we spent a lot of time chasing our tails. The product was always under more-features-needed duress. Which meant that I spent a lot of time just putting out fires. It meant that sales meetings went well, but closing deals was challenging. It also meant that we never had more than 4 full-time people. Because there wasn't enough of any function to do to warrant another hire dedicated to [FUNCTION]. Now, at Air Traffic Control — Grow Pipeline With Existing Content, we're faced with the most phenomenal need to hire. Our customer count is FLYING. So many thoughtful use cases. Great questions. We need more support materials for them and we're creating that. I spend a lot of time on customer calls. I learn something in every single one. We record them. Then line them up to translate those calls into support materials. And there's now enough of that work to require a full-time CS leader. Same for partnerships. Same for RevOps/MarketingOps. And our product roadmap is INSANELY exciting (I love what we do today and our rapid growth says we're right to feel incredible re what we've built, but if you saw where we're headed you might faint). And the only thing holding us back there is human bandwidth. Our devs are WORLD CLASS and chugging on all cylinders. So... ...we need more people. The balancing act is getting those people before anyone gets too stressed for too long *without* putting our capital runway at risk. And it's the first time as a founder I've ever been in a position to raise to *grow* as opposed to raising to *survive.* It is... a lot. And I'm so impossibly thrilled it's where we are. What's wild is where we'll be once the team fills out just a bit more. Being kept up at night thinking about how to fund and find our new crew members is actually a joy. It's just one I'm learning along the way. Thankful for advisors, friends, and our current small but mighty crew that they know what needs to be done and can help us chart a course. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far... go together. If you want to go really far and really fast, go with insanely smart people. :-)

Working for startups can be fun… but my life has been exponentially better since I started working for myself. I spent nearly 7 years hustling, grinding, and doing everything I could to grow in my prop tech career. Working 60-80 hours a week every week for that long, though, is a great way to get burned out. And - it’s a great way to sacrifice personal relationships. My wife never batted an eye - but all of those missed date nights, dinner parties with friends, and time with the family where I was totally distracted with work absolutely add up. So when I was laid off for the second time in 2022, I said I was done with full time roles in startups. The hustle and grind can be fun - but trading equity for your most valuable asset (time) isn’t always a good deal. Am I totally opposed to another full time role? No. I’m always open to conversations. But, I’m never working those long hours just to keep the duct tape and glue together again. If my living life outside of work is going to lead to catastrophic system failures at work, that means the company isn’t paying its fair share. What am I doing now? I’m a real estate broker with some consulting gigs on the side. The real estate business and self employment sure aren’t stress free - but, I have the flexibility I need to really be 100% there when I’m not working. And I don’t need to fight an uphill battle when a business decision/change needs to be made - I just need to look in the mirror. Why am I posting this? Because a lot of you out there are working your asses off for startups who underpay and expect your world to revolve around them. You deserve some balance. Don’t sacrifice your time, your sanity, and your relationships if it’s not a fair trade. The only thing money can’t buy is time. Put yourself, your life, your relationships first. You are not your work. Pictured below - my clients and I at their home closing yesterday (5/15) in Alpharetta. 🎉