I don't know how stripe does it , but employees want to know what his stock is worth and the company needs to know how much stock to give. Since we are private we just say "our internal best guess for our evaluation is $XXmillion therefore we will give you X number of shares worth $200k at this valuation. There is no finessing of the cap table. We have pre allocated a certain percentage of stock for employees, we issue out of that allocation.
I don't see an answer here for why reducing the unofficial internal valuation is bad except for the fact that they are saying we might not sell for as much anymore which affects all current stock holders if it ends up being true.
I don't see an answer here for why reducing the unofficial internal valuation is bad except for the fact that they are saying we might not sell for as much anymore which affects all current stock holders if it ends up being true.