The Private Tech Company That Let Employee Stock Grants Evaporate

Household tech names Airbnb and Stripe have gone to great lengths to prevent arcane tax rules from creating disaster for the employees who helped build those firms. Airbnb went public just before employees’ valuable stock grants expired, while Stripe is raising as much as $4 billion privately to avoid that fate.

Foursquare—the once-buzzy privately held geolocation company—is taking a tack that’s less favorable to those employees: simply letting their potential stock grants vanish before they have a chance to cash in. The decision affects more than 100 former employees, some of whom were the earliest to work at the 14-year-old firm, according to five current and former employees. Foursquare’s decision represents the other side of the extreme startups face in dealing with an increasingly common problem for valuable private tech companies that have waited to go public.