He Personally Walked 200 Employees Through a Spreadsheet Where the First Number Was Zero

Alexei Mitko was roughly employee twenty at Canva, an early employee at Koala, and later designed the ESOP — employee stock option plan — at Eucalyptus, the Australian health-tech company later acquired by Hims & Hers. That plan distributed close to $300 million back to staff, reportedly the largest employee equity payout in Australian startup history. He's now a partner at Co-Ventures. The part of the job he describes in the most granular detail isn't the structuring. It's what he did with every single new hire, one at a time.

Showing people the version where it's worth nothing

Eucalyptus ran on radical financial transparency — open books, visible cash position, staff able to see exactly how much runway the company had left at any given week. Mitko personally walked the company's first two hundred employees through their own equity, and the first thing he'd show them wasn't the upside case. "I would specifically call it out to them," he says. "The first value in that table was zero. If we don't succeed, this is worth zero." It's a deliberately uncomfortable thing to put in front of someone on day one — but it meant that when cash got tight, as it does in every early-stage company, nobody was blindsided. "They turn to their coworkers," he says, "and go, I've noticed we only have six months of cash left." The anxiety was already priced in, because he'd priced it in himself, on purpose, before anyone needed to find out the hard way.

"If you think about equity as a statistical exercise across multiple years, and potentially multiple decades of your career, then the net present value is more than zero."

Two startups he doesn't put on his LinkedIn

Mitko is candid that his own record isn't the clean success story it can look like from outside. "I had two startups in my career that went south," he says. "You don't see them... everybody just thinks that I went through a string of successes." His first-ever investment, bought as a university student in the US, was General Motors stock purchased right before the 2008 financial crisis bailout — it lost roughly ninety per cent of its value. He notes, without much self-pity, that if he'd picked Ford instead, in the same window, he'd have made seven times his money. The throughline from the GM stock to the two failed startups to the Eucalyptus payout isn't a hot streak. It's someone who has personally sat on both sides of the spreadsheet — the zero and the number that actually mattered — which is exactly why two hundred new hires got shown the zero first.

Why Australia still doesn't have a real secondary market

Mitko's structural critique of Australian equity is specific rather than general: the country caps private companies at fifty shareholders, compared to a thousand in the US, which is a direct, legislative reason a real secondary market for startup equity hasn't developed here. Employees holding equity in a growing private company have far fewer ways to realise any of that value before an exit than their American counterparts do — a policy detail, not a cultural one, standing between Australian startup employees and the kind of outcome Eucalyptus eventually delivered. "Until the legislation changes," he says, "it's going to be an uphill battle." Asked what's made him most nervous in his life — after climbing the highest mountain in Europe, after being sent to boarding school alone at thirteen — his answer has nothing to do with any of it: proposing to his wife.