First Cheque with Cheryl Mack & Maxine Minter 
About Alexey Mitko
Alexey Mitko is a general partner at Co Ventures, a pre-seed fund that backs software companies with at least one Australian founder, which he runs with Maxine Minter.
He came to investing from startup operations. He was around the twentieth employee at Canva, one of the early employees at Koala, and later built the finance, people and legal functions at telehealth company Eucalyptus, where he designed the employee share option plan. That work has made him known in the Australian ecosystem as the 'ESOP Guy'.
On First Cheque with Cheryl Mack and Maxine Minter, he explained how startup employees should think about equity.
- Talks about
- Hiring & Team, Startup Lessons
In conversation.
1 episode
First Cheque with Cheryl Mack & Maxine Minter Go straight to the good bits.
Key moments from How to Think About Equity as a Startup Employee.
- 3:01The three ESOP questions every founder needs to answer
- 5:58How to model equity allocation across rounds and hundreds of hires
- 9:10Using ESOP as your most powerful recruitment and retention tool
- 12:02How walking 200 employees through their equity built culture and trust
- 15:02Open financials, shrinking cash balances, and what went wrong along the way
- 17:55Why Australia's ESOP ecosystem is still behind Silicon Valley
- 26:48Teaching employees to understand equity: the Google Sheet that started at zero
- 29:20High salary vs heavy equity: giving employees a real choice
- 32:16Common ESOP mistakes founders make and how to avoid them
- 35:03Why Australians treat startup equity like monopoly money
The path so far.
- Now
General Partner · Co Ventures
- Earlier · Scale-up
Finance/HR/Legal leadership · Eucalyptus
- Earlier · Scale-up
Finance/HR/Legal leadership · Koala
- Earlier · Scale-up
Finance/HR/Legal leadership · Canva
Sources: dayone.fm
Co Ventures on Day One
Co Ventures is an Australian venture capital firm that invests only at pre-seed, often at the idea stage.
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