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July 20, 2022   Entrepreneurs, Start-ups, Small Businesses, FinTech and Alternative Finance, Fintech International, Personal Finance, Stories, Venture Funding and Building   No comments

What You Need to Know About Employee Loans in Down Round Times

New York Times | Erin Griffith | Jul 20, 2022

employee loans - What You Need to Know About Employee Loans in Down Round TimesTech workers took out loans based on the value of their start-up stock in recent years. That may come back to haunt them.

  • SAN FRANCISCO — Last year, Bolt Financial, a payments start-up, began a new program for its employees. They owned stock options in the company, some worth millions of dollars on paper, but couldn’t touch that money until Bolt sold or went public.
  • So Bolt began providing them with loans — some reaching hundreds of thousands of dollars — against the value of their stock.
  • In May, Bolt laid off 200 workers. That set off a 90-day period for those who had taken out the loans to pay the money back. The company tried to help them figure out options for repayment.

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  • In recent years, companies such as Quid and Secfi have sprung up to offer loans or other forms of financing to start-up employees, using the value of their private company shares as a sort of collateral. These providers estimate that start-up employees around the world hold at least $1 trillion in equity to lend against.
  • But as the start-up economy now deflates, buffeted by economic uncertainty, soaring inflation and rising interest rates, Bolt’s situation serves as a warning. While most of them are structured to be forgiven if a start-up fails, employees could still face a tax bill because the loan forgiveness is treated as taxable income. And in situations like Bolt’s, the loans may be difficult to repay on short notice.

Rick Heitzmann, an investor at FirstMark Capital:

No one’s been thinking about what happens when things go down.  Everyone’s only thinking about the upside.

Underwater loans

  • Some start-up workers regret taking the loans. Grant Lee, 39, spent five years working at Optimizely, a software start-up, accumulating stock options worth millions.
  • When he left the company in 2018, he had a choice to buy his options or forfeit them. He decided to exercise them, taking out a $400,000 loan to help with the cost and taxes.
  • In 2020, Optimizely was acquired by Episerver, a Swedish software company, for a price that was lower than its last private valuation of $1.1 billion.

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  • That meant the stock options held by employees at the higher valuation were worth less. For Mr. Lee, the value of his Optimizely stock fell below that of the loan he had taken out. While his loan was forgiven, he still owed around $15,000 in taxes since loan forgiveness counts as taxable income.
  • In a downturn, loan terms may become more onerous. The I.P.O. market is frozen, pushing potential payoffs further into the future, and the depressed stock market means private start-up shares are probably worth less than they were during boom times, especially in the last two years.

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