David Lindsay, 38, is the CEO of Confluentia Group, a New York City startup business analysis consulting firm in the financial services sector. Like the CEOs of many other young companies, Lindsay wanted to grant stock options to Confluentia's employees performance incentives and to set a tone for the company's values. For Lindsay, the decision to grant options to employees was an easy one. However, making a decision about where to set the exercise price and how much of the company to give away was a different story."It was important to get that tension right between doing the right thing by employees and senior level staff--in terms of showing integrity, being fair, and encouraging an entrepreneurial mind-set--while also managing to maintain an appropriate level of control over the direction of the company and an equity stake that was in line with the risk I had taken," Lindsay says.
In October 2007, Lindsay found himself asking the all-too-common question that he couldn't easily answer: What's my company worth?Content Continues Below
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