Bachelor Thesis, Master Thesis or Project Study
📌 Key facts
Contents
- 💡 Background
- 🦾Who We Are
- 🎯 Goals
- 🧠 Topics of Interest
- 🎓 Profile
- 📚 Further Reading
- 📄 Requirements to any Work
- 📬 How to Apply
💡 Background
You are enthusiastic about entrepreneurship, and would you like to become active in this area? Great, there exist numerous ways to get involved in startups! But how much startup equity / stock options do you gain in which roles? This interesting question and many more should be dealt with by comparing the different models and best practices in the US and Germany. In detail you should determine how much equity compensation founders, board-advisors, consultants or early employees receive in both countries.
A brief overview of the questions the thesis is intended to answer:
- What is an appropriate equity amount for a consultant?
- What is typical CEO equity in a startup?
- What is typical founder equity split in a startup?
- What is an appropriate equity amount for a researcher that aligns his/her won research with that of the startup?
- What is an appropriate equity amount for the first few employees?
- What is an appropriate equity amount for “new”/late cofounders?
- What is an appropriate equity amount for a startup advisor? What does it depend on?
- What is an appropriate equity amount for someone who contributes to the company via investor intros/pitches or by providing a network?
- What is an appropriate equity amount for researchers working with a startup (professors, doctoral students)?
- For which services are startups willing to pay in stock (options) and equity?
- What innovative and promising forms of participation in startups are there?
- What proportion of equity is appropriate in different phases of the startup?
🦾Who We Are
The Chair for Strategy and Organization is focused on research with impact. This means we do not want to repeat old ideas and base our research solely on the research people did 10 years ago. Instead, we currently research topics that will shape the future. Topics such as Agile Organizations and Digital Disruption, Blockchain Technology, Creativity and Innovation, Digital Transformation and Business Model Innovation, Diversity, Education: Education Technology and Performance Management, HRTech, Leadership, and Teams. We are always early in noticing trends, technologies, strategies, and organizations that shape the future, which has its ups and downs.
🎯 Goals
- Research best practices for distributing equity compensation for startups
- Collect data from the US and Germany
- Determine the most promising compensation models
- Determine the most lucrative contributions of labor and expertise
- Identify inventive services and new innovations for distributing equity
- Get in touch with entrepreneurs to evaluate their compensation decisions
- Visualize your results
🧠 Topics of Interest
- Entrepreneurship in general
- Getting engaged in startups
- Equity structures and incentives
- Venture Capital
🎓 Profile
- Reliable and self-driven
- Enthusiasm for entrepreneurship / venture capital / innovations / equity structures
- Ability to do sophisticated internet, desk research, and connect with practitioners
- Passion to learn more about the future and do research with impact
📚 Further Reading
Revolutionising talent acquisition in a world where the best candidates are scarce - EQT Ventures'...
Today, London-based Beamery, the recruitment CRM and marketing platform, has announced its $28m Series B funding round, led by EQT Ventures.The investment was made alongside M12 (Microsoft's venture fund) and existing investors Index Ventures, Edenred Capital Partners and Angelpad Fund. So, why did EQT Ventures invest in Beamery?
medium.com
angel.co
angel.co
The Holloway Guide to Equity Compensation - Holloway
Stock options, RSUs, job offers, and taxes-a detailed reference, including hundreds of resources, explained from the ground up, for both employees and managers.
www.holloway.com
Co-founder Equity Split
Deciding how to fairly divide equity and ownership of a startup is important to both your co-founders and your business's future. This free tool (based on Gust data) will help you ask the right questions to determine how much value each founder will contribute, and give you a sensible, objective recommendation for a fair equity split.
cofounders.gust.com
Index Ventures | Rewarding Talent | Index Ventures
Our guide to stock options
www.indexventures.com
New front in the war for talent | Index Ventures
Recruitment has traditionally treated potential employees like vendors. They are expected to pitch, in the form of CVs and interviews, and the company chooses the best fit based on how much they will cost and the level of experience they can bring.
www.indexventures.com
OptionPlan | Index Ventures
Entrepreneurs know how important stock options are for hiring and retaining the best talent. But to create an effective option plan you need to know how much to award to each team member. We compiled the largest ever set of benchmark data, comprising over 4,000 option grants from more than 200 startups across the US and Europe.
www.indexventures.com
deutschestartups.org
deutschestartups.org
Tokenizing Venture Capital - Capital Innovators
The future of venture capital is tokenized securities transacted on blockchain. What are tokenized securities? They are digital tokens representing fractional equity ownership in a business often referred to as crypto assets, which is an asset class backed by real assets and cryptography. The benefi
capitalinnovators.com
Further Links:
https://fi.co/insight/a-guide-to-startup-employee-equity
https://www.ycombinator.com/library/5x-how-to-split-equity-among-co-founders
https://meldvaluation.com/blog/start-ups/complete-guide-to-startup-equity-compensation/
https://review.firstround.com/A-Counterintuitive-System-for-Startup-Compensation
https://generalassemb.ly/blog/a-guide-to-startup-compensation/
https://fundingsage.com/giving-away-startup-ownership-much-much/
https://www.cleverism.com/how-much-equity-give-new-co-founders-employees/
https://humaninterest.com/blog/startup-equity-basics-ask-stock-accept/
https://triplebyte.com/startup-equity-value-calculator
https://medium.com/silicon-roundabout-hub/how-to-value-your-startup-and-how-much-equity-to-give-away-guest-post-6530c7562601
https://www.ilab.ceu.edu/articles/equity-in-a-startup-all-you-need-to-know
https://angel.co/blog/9-terms-youll-see-in-your-equity-offer-and-what-they-actually-mean
https://www.holloway.com/g/equity-compensation/sections/typical-employee-equity-levels
https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/2ydkbw/stock_options_at_late_stage_startup/
https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/startup-equity
https://www.ilab.ceu.edu/articles/equity-in-a-startup-all-you-need-to-know
https://seedlegals.com/resources/how-much-equity-should-uk-startups-give-employees/
https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/09/deciding-how-much-equity-to-give-your-key-employees/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAFI4pO6772ALGx8ystm-tbcaT4NgYtXeIsxza_C0TMWz2SaVbsGwIucKcodUyhHuWmuNy-Y9XfN9HoBSx0qUcOl9E8JawAqLM2O62UnJ62NJ_48aotMw61LeagMAQTGgholEUYaLjO8FK1uBTPl2k0VRG7VGZ8hvXM77I7I6ZQnS
https://fundersclub.com/learn/guides/understanding-startup-investments/startup-equity-investments/
📄 Requirements to any Work
We do not want your research to gather dust in some corner of bookshelf but make it accessible to the world. Thus, we warmly encourage you to create some or all of the following:
- Infograph - visually represent some of your work (find examples here)
- Slide Deck - summarize your research and possibly present it
- Extract most important sequences from podcasts, videos, and other media
- 3-4 Tweets about the most important findings and summarizing the topic
- optional: Medium Article - let people outside the university know about your research and start your personal brand
📬 How to Apply
If you are interested, please contact Prof. Dr. Isabell Welpe and Marius Wiggert (e-mail below) by submitting your CV and grade report. Please also briefly outline your tentative research idea (research question, data and methods, possible outcomes with a tentative outline all in word as *.docx)
We're greatly looking forward to hearing more about you!
👉 welpe@tum.de, mariuswiggert@berkeley.edu