Alexey Mitko is a partner at Co-Ventures, the architect behind Eucalyptus' ESOP plan, and widely known in the Australian ecosystem as "ESOP Guy." He was around employee number twenty at Canva and one of the early employees at Koala, giving him a front-row seat to three of Australia's biggest consumer tech outcomes.

In this episode, Cheryl and Maxine unpack how Alexey designed the ESOP plan that led to roughly $300 million distributed back to Eucalyptus employees, the largest ESOP payout in Australian history. He walks through the three questions every founder faces but rarely verbalises: who gets equity, how much, and why you have an ESOP plan in the first place.

You'll also hear how he modelled allocation across multiple rounds and hundreds of hires to avoid giving too much away early, why he personally walked the first two hundred employees through their equity, and why Australia's lack of a secondary market keeps ESOP feeling like monopoly money. Alexey closes with his Big Cojones moment: proposing to his wife, the most nervous he's ever been despite having climbed Europe's highest mountain.