METHODOLOGY
How the numbers work
The calculator applies the same hypothetical cash and equity package to each company in my recruiting archive.
What gets counted
A campaign groups recruiting messages about one employer and opportunity. Duplicate messages are removed. Career-history records and records awaiting review are excluded. Repeated outreach to the same company is compared separately, never added together.
A common starting package
I’ve excluded compensation figures from the emails. Many messages omitted pay, I haven’t asked permission to share the figures I received, and pay is negotiable. Using the same starting package for every company makes this a comparison of company growth, not a salary survey.
Defaults are $200,000 annual cash and $50,000 annualized equity. You can change both. These are assumptions, not company pay data. Salary stays fixed; no promotions or additional grants are assumed.
At 4× growth, the default package is worth $400,000 per year on paper, or $350,000 with 25% dilution. Company growth applies only to equity. The gain is already included in the total.
A $200,000 grant over four years is $50,000 annualized. The calculator revalues that original grant as if held to the comparison date. It does not calculate current pay, vested amounts or sale proceeds. Vesting, liquidity, exercise costs, liquidation preferences, taxes and dividends are excluded.
Growth per year
“Equity growth / yr” is the compound annual growth rate (CAGR), after your dilution assumption. Salary and grant size do not affect it.
A 4× change over two years is +100% per year compounded; over eight years it is +18.9%. This describes growth between two dates, not a forecast or salary raise. Valuations approximate equity growth; they do not measure employee proceeds.
The period uses the dates of the prices or valuations. Those dates may start before outreach or end before today. Years are counted as full calendar years plus a fraction for remaining days.
Periods under one year keep their package value but receive no annual rate. Missing evidence and an assumed flat 1× also receive no annual rate. A zero or missing grant amount does not prevent calculating the rate per dollar of equity.
FINRA’s explanation of compounded annual returns ↗ · Annualization and short periods ↗
Outreach dates
Dates are rounded to the start of the outreach quarter for privacy. Starting prices and valuations use that date. For non-trading days, the first closing price within the next seven calendar days is used.
Prices and valuations
Public stock prices are from the October 2026 snapshot, not live quotes. Closing prices are from October 16, 2026. Private valuations may be older; each row shows its date.
Company status describes whether a company is public, private, acquired or closed, using dated ownership research. “Status unknown” means the available evidence does not establish which applies. It does not mean the recruiting email is unverified. A retired product or inaccessible website alone does not establish that the company closed. A status label does not establish what employee equity was worth. Updated ownership sources appear in company details; their check dates can be later than the saved stock-price snapshot.
Company status chart
The chart counts each named company once across the full public leaderboard. Repeated outreach quarters do not add companies. Withheld companies are excluded, so this is not a failure rate for the entire archive. Changing pay inputs, sorting or filtering does not change the chart’s denominator. Click a category to filter the table.
Acquired or merged businesses are separate from recorded shutdowns and liquidations. An acquisition may predate outreach and is not evidence of failure. Subsidiary sales, asset sales and regional wind-downs count as partial changes when the evidence does not establish what happened to the whole employer. A discontinued product alone does not prove company closure. None of these labels establishes an employee equity payout or loss. Current status may differ from the date it was checked.
Status at first outreach
The transition diagram starts with each company’s first eligible outreach quarter, independent of compensation ranking. Starting status is currently established for 47 of 239 named companies. The other starting statuses remain unknown. The diagram includes them by default; uncheck the checkbox to show only known starts. Unchanged paths are faded so changes are easier to see.
Dated ownership records or public trading history must cover the whole outreach quarter, through the snapshot date for the current quarter. A listing or acquisition within the quarter stays uncertain rather than revealing whether an email arrived before or after that event. Missing prices do not prove the company was private, and current private status is not applied to earlier years.
Selecting a transition filters the leaderboard to those companies’ first outreach quarters. Clearing it restores the normal ranking across all quarters. Company details link the historical evidence. The diagram compares two endpoints: a private company that listed publicly and was later acquired appears as Private → Acquired. Intermediate events and employee equity outcomes are not shown.
Growth evidence
Share prices: latest saved close divided by the starting close, adjusted for stock splits. Both come from the same provider. A later IPO price cannot substitute for a private grant’s strike price. Google uses Alphabet Class C shares.
Share prices already reflect the market effects of new share issuance. The dilution input adds a separate assumed ownership reduction and defaults to zero. For private companies, dilution from funding rounds is not reconstructed; it is whatever you enter in that input.
Published valuations: the latest comparable valuation after the starting date divided by the most recent valuation on or before it. Private valuations are not paired with public market caps. Funding amounts and unverified email claims are excluded. A company’s valuation does not establish what employee shares could sell for.
When a valuation is dated only to a month or year, the calculation uses the end of that period rather than assuming an earlier date.
Click a company to see its dates and sources. “Latest” means the last comparable value in the saved data, which may be old. Prices are saved snapshots, not live quotes. “Growth snapshot” dates the growth data; each row shows the date of its own latest price or valuation. Company status also reflects saved research rather than a live listing check.
Changing calculator inputs only recalculates against these saved values. It does not fetch market prices. Prices change on this site only when I refresh the source data and publish a new export.
Missing values and ranking
Missing growth uses an assumed 1× by default, visibly marked in amber. This holds starting equity value flat before dilution; it is not a measured return or a claim that no news exists. Uncheck “Assume 1× where growth is unknown” to leave those packages unmodeled. The source evidence remains unknown, and no annual growth rate is invented.
Acquisitions, shutdowns and other business changes do not receive that fallback. Their employee equity payout or recovery is unknown; neither unchanged value nor a total loss is assumed. These packages stay unmodeled unless equity is explicitly set to zero for a cash-only scenario.
“Stale valuation” means the last recorded valuation is at least three full calendar years old at the growth snapshot date. It does not classify a company as struggling or closed. Missing valuation dates and public stock prices do not receive this badge. The badge describes the age of the evidence, not a new valuation.
Zero equity produces a cash-only result. Blank or invalid inputs remain missing.
Each company appears once, using its highest result for the selected metric across outreach quarters. Sorting uses unrounded values. Ties share a rank; missing results stay last in either direction.
Limitations
Results use nominal USD without inflation adjustment. Applying the same starting package across years does not give it the same purchasing power. Comparisons cover different periods. The annual growth rate accounts for the duration between recorded values, but does not make different companies or periods equally risky.
Holding the original equity to the comparison date may not have been possible. I could have left before vesting, sold earlier, or faced restrictions on keeping or selling it. The calculation does not model those events, layoffs, job changes, raises, bonuses, promotions or new grants. It revalues the starting package; it does not estimate my actual annual pay or lifetime earnings.
This is my saved recruiting history, not a representative sample of the job market. Missing messages and company data affect the results. Outreach does not establish that I could have joined, received the assumed package, or stayed long enough to vest.