Boris is the wise ol’ CEO of TNW who writes a weekly column on everything about being an entrepreneur in tech — from managing stress to embracing awkwardness. You can get his musings straight to your inbox by signing up for his newsletter!

In most organizations, people who move up in the chain become experts in their fields… but they start acting like they’re experts on everything .

Annoying? Yes. Am I any different? No.

I recently did a management exercise with my team called “Lost at Sea.” You get a list of items you can bring on your lifeboat and then you work together to sort them by order of importance. It’s great fun as each pick tells you a lot about your colleagues and team structure. I’d even recommend doing it with your family and friends!

During the exercise, I knew which items would actually be most useful, but magnanimously allowed my team to form their own opinions and find what we could all agree on. Sure, our score was a bit lower than if everyone had listened to me, but we did get a few more points coming to a decision quickly.

After the exercise, I was asked what I had learned. My conclusion was obvious: people should listen to me more often!

Then someone in my management team spoke up. “Well yes, but only because you own a boat, so that makes you more knowledgeable about this particular subject than us.”

Ouch.

It was a great reminder and intelligent observation from my co-worker. I’m not smarter than everyone else, but I do have more experience and understanding than others when it comes to certain topics.

I’m in a boat almost every day to be honest, and I’m probably the only person in my team who’s built a raft… then sailed it down a river, lost control, almost died, and ended up being rescued by lifeguards.

If the team-building event had been about development, marketing, or SEO, our score would’ve been terrible if everyone listened to me.

Sometimes, you just have to accept you’re not the smartest person in the room… and that your raft-building skills might need some work.

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Here’s what to do with your equity if you’ve been laid off from a startup

If you’ve just found yourself laid off from a startup, you are far from alone. StartupGenome states that 74% of US startups have had to lay off full time employees , and it’s been reported that over 40% of Nordic startups and over 60% of French startups are enacting some form of layoffs .

Being let go is always hard, but if you have stock options as a startup employee, it’s also the time to make some very important decisions about your financial present and future. What you do with your equity could be a life-changing event. It’s key to find a way to manage your finances so you can live today while investing in your future.

Exercising your stock options can be an expensive process. While making a major investment just as you find yourself out of work might feel like a huge risk, in some cases it may be an opportunity for incredible gains you should not pass up without careful consideration.

To help you figure out what’s best for you and what you can afford, here are some key questions to ask yourself and some tips for getting the answers.

Please keep in mind that laws and procedures vary from country to country, so I’ve given an example of how things work in the US, but these considerations are still good to keep in mind regardless of where you’re facing this scenario.

How do I know how much equity I have?

Stock options are something you would agree upon with your company, in most cases shortly after you started work. In addition to your employment contract, you should have a separate document called a stock option grant agreement that details the terms of your equity. If you are unsure if you have such an agreement or if you don’t understand it, you should consult with your HR or Finance department, or your company’s equity management software, if they use any.

Grant terms include the vesting period, which means how long you need to have worked for the company to have the opportunity to vest stock options and the right to exercise those and convert them to shares. For example, after one year of employment, you might be able to exercise into shares 25% of your granted stock options, and after four years, 100%. Terms vary from startup to startup.

Alright, I know how many stock options are vested. What do I stand to gain from exercising my stock options?

Let’s say you started working for your company in 2016, when their stock was worth $10/share. Now, four years later, you’re laid off and you find that you have the option to buy 1,000 shares. What this means is you get to buy that stock at the price it was worth when you signed on in 2016: $10/share.

You have the rare opportunity to buy something today at its past price. Now in 2020, let’s say that stock is worth $100/share. So, the basic theory is that you can spend $10,000 for those 1,000 shares, which are now worth $100,000. So your profit would be $90,000 worth of stock. But …

How much does it really cost to exercise my options?

Now let’s set up this example for the US. Your “exercise cost” is, let’s say, the $10,000 it cost to buy your shares plus taxes on your theoretical profit. The tricky part is figuring out those taxes. Since your company isn’t yet publicly traded, you might not know exactly what your shares are worth at the moment.

In the US, in order to find out, you need to ask your HR/Finance department for the latest “409A,” or the current common share fair market value. “409A” refers to a section of the 2004 American Jobs Creation Act , which states that each company must get a valuation every year and when it closes a new financing round. Your company must provide you with this number.

Supposing the current share fair market value is $100. So your exercising cost is $10,000 to buy the shares, plus taxes on that $90,000 profit.

Some tax points to watch out for:

If you have Incentive Stock Options (ISO), you may need to pay AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) on that profit rather than being taxed like normal income, which is great because it may be lower.

Non-Qualified Stock Options (NSO) are taxed at normal income rates.

How long do I have to decide what I want to do?

In the US, you ISOs by law provide up to 90 days to decide if you want to exercise your options or not. If you need longer, you can ask your company to extend your deadline. Some will, but they are not required to do so.

You should also note that if you have ISO and extend them beyond the regulated limit of 90 days, they automatically become NSO and so you might need to pay higher taxes. You should consider these time frames when deciding when is the best time to act for you.

Can I afford to exercise my stock options?

This investment, like all investments, carries risk that must be considered in your decision process. If you have the money to pay for your stocks and the taxes out of pocket, that’s great. Still, you’ll want to remember that this is an illiquid investment – you’re gaining value in stock, but you can’t expect to gain access to that cash any time soon. You need to be stable enough to handle that financially.

A lot of people don’t have the funds on hand to buy their stocks outright, especially given layoffs and halted hiring processes. If that’s the case, you can consider:

Digging into your savings or borrowing from friends and family.

Services like my company, match former startup employees with investors who provide the capital to exercise your stock options in return for a share in the future gains.

Personal loans: keep in mind that you’ll need to pay back these loans and interest whether or not you ever see profit from your shares.

What is the risk?

Investing in a startup is considered a high-risk investment. Depending on the success of your company and changes in the market, the value of your shares could decrease, or your startup might fail and the value diminish completely.

What could be the reward?

Just look at early employees at giants like Facebook to get an idea of what these stock payouts can really look like.

Owning stock in the right company that eventually goes public or exits for a significant amount can be a life-changing event, reshaping your financial future and buying you immense freedom.

Times are tough, but not impossible

Essentially, don’t let the thought that the process seems complicated or expensive discourage you from looking seriously at the opportunity in front of you. Even in complicated times like the coronavirus pandemic, there are ways to be forward thinking and take advantage of the work you put into your startup and own your hard-earned equity

You worked hard for those stock options, and they’re yours. If you are optimistic and confident about the company and believe it’s going to succeed, don’t let the complicated and expensive process take away what is rightfully yours.

OKR is the language remote teams must speak to succeed

Across organizations worldwide, the coronavirus pandemic has radically changed the way teams work together. Most of us had to transition to remote working within only a few days.

I know I don’t just speak for myself when I say that for many teams and their management, working from home represents a new and unknown situation that bears various challenges.

To successfully navigate through this new way of work, it’s more important than ever to master the rules of the goal management method OKR and to have implemented it within the company.

Main challenges of remote work

The adaptation of communication across team members can be quite a hurdle when switching to remote work. It’s not just dry theory, I’ve experienced it, too.

In my team, we often talked about KPIs and OKRs during lunch and at the coffee machine. This informal communication is lost now that we’re no longer physically gathered in one space, making it all the more important to review progress on goals in 1-on-1s with direct reports.

A nother hurdle is alignment. Especially teams who are not used to working from home find it difficult to keep their focus on what needs to be done and how they can contribute to the company’s goals.

It can well happen that they lose track of what is important, what they need to achieve, and how to contribute to the organization’s purpose — resulting in reduced motivation and commitment.

Last but definitely not least, transparency can also be a tough one in a remote working environment. And by transparency, I don’t mean having full control over what individual team members do and don’t do, but transparency around the progress of your team’s and organization’s goals.

How the OKR method sets remote teams up for success

Now I expect you’ve likely heard about OKR (Objectives and Key Results), the prominent way to set and manage goals throughout an organization — but still let’s go over it quickly so everyone is on the same pages.

The Objective tells you where you want to go, the Key Results are measurable results that you need to achieve in order to get there.

Let’s say your Objective is ‘Improve employee retention’. The Key Results could then be ‘Increase employee NPS from 10 to 50,’ and ‘Reduce voluntary employee turnover from 15% to 5%.’

Implemented correctly, working with Objectives and Key Results helps to achieve better communication, more transparency and alignment across teams. It provides a common language for sharing what everybody is working on and how they’re progressing, no matter where they are working from.

It’s a common language that leaves little or no room for interpretation, making it clear to everybody on the team, what they should be focusing on.

More transparency

The transparency aspect within the OKR method does not end with defining your OKRs and sharing them with your team. Sharing the steps towards an Objective or a Key Result is just as important, regardless of the work situation.

The number one reason teams fail to achieve their goals is that they set them at the beginning of the quarter and then forget about them (‘set it and forget it’).

Teams successfully using OKRs, discuss their progress in weekly or bi-weekly 1-on-1s between managers and their direct reports. When updating OKRs regularly, every achievement matters and it becomes important to show how everyone is progressing, keeping the team in the loop.

When we feel in the loop, it unleashes constructive, positive energy across the organization. It’s motivating to see what other team members are up to. After all, we’re all in the same boat — no matter where we’re working from.

Better alignment

Working with the OKR method also promotes alignment across the organization — an aspect that can easily get lost for teams not used to working remotely. A good OKR implementation connects quarterly goals that teams work on every day to the higher-level long term goals of the company.

This way, OKR also enables a focused and purpose-oriented work environment in which everyone is actively involved in the company’s journey towards achieving its vision. This is a crucial aspect when it comes to employee motivation, not only when working remotely.

Gain back control

COVID has impacted businesses across all verticals and many of us still feel overwhelmed with uncertainty. Working with OKRs can help to gain back control and create the focus you need to adjust to the current situation.

Companies should reflect on whether their strategy needs to change in order to adapt to the current circumstances. If necessary, new company OKRs mirroring your new priorities and what everyone needs to focus on to push past the situation have to be created. For some businesses, this may mean a complete shift in strategy in order to survive.

What’s most important in these uncertain times is to take enough time to properly communicate new company OKRs so teams can add goals that align with the new strategy. Also, an OKR software plays an important role in keeping goals top of mind and everyone informed about progress, when working remotely.

The pandemic will pass eventually but it should be clear to everyone that the immense changes in the way we’ve been collaborating for the past months will not simply be reversed once the pandemic is over. And that’s a good thing.

Even though the concept of remote working may be new and therefore challenging to many of us, it brings numerous advantages in the first place. For years, the desire for improved workplace flexibility has been present among employees because it enables them to organize their life in a more autonomous way.

Personally, I have observed that the quality of our meetings, including our OKR-related meetings, has improved. Everyone starts on time now, people are better prepared, and the meetings more effective. Not to mention the advantages workplace flexibility brings for organizations — from improved employee retention to higher profitability.

The prerequisite for successful remote work models is a “joint language” with which employees, teams, and management can successfully communicate across locations — so start speaking it as soon as possible.