Hi X,
Thank you for taking the time to work with me on this offer. I cannot emphasize how excited I am about what you are building at [company], and the opportunity to work with experienced operators like yourselves. This is a company I can really see myself at for a long time. Although the offer you made is quite generous, I’d love to work you all to get creative and find a way that we can get to my total compensation to [target compensation], to be on par with my offer from [competing company].
To this end, I’d love to see if there’s anything we can do to better align my compensation and contributions with the growth and success of the business. I have a few ideas for how we might be able to work together to achieve this:
- Increase my common stock equity to XXX bps, keeping my vesting schedule 4 years, with a 1 year cliff.
- With the steep increase of the strike price to the new round, I estimate that my annualized cost to exercise is [cost to exercise] (assuming a strike price of $XX). Might [company] be open to covering [cost to exercise] of my cost to exercise the shares? I am open to receiving this in additional salary, a year end bonus, or split across both, whatever makes the most sense for you all.
I appreciate your willingness to work together on this. I’m happy to jump on a quick call to discuss. I’m around today if you’re free.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
[your name]