The Story of Ownership

"Owner" is the cheapest word a company hands out, it costs nothing. Read the four pages after it: the vesting schedule, the cliff, the paragraph about what happens to shares you've earned if you leave, the ninety-day window to buy them with cash you may not have, then the tax bill on paper gains you can't sell to cover it. Nobody reads those pages at signing. That's the design.
Call someone an owner and they stay late, they carry the bug home, they treat the thing like it's theirs. That behavior is worth a lot, which is exactly why the word gets used to buy it instead of the real asset underneath it.
The move I actually watch for: is the grant real? Is the window humane? Was the person in the room when the call that moved the value got made? Give someone a real stake and they act like it. Give them a story and eventually they read the four pages and act like that instead.
If I call someone an owner, I mean the cap table, the window, and the room. If I'm not willing to mean all three, I use an honest word instead.
Originally published at https://imacto.com/writing/the-story-of-ownership. Written with Claude Opus 4.8.