Instacart engineers earning $500k+ in stock may be getting richer

In what may be a sign that the fintech industry is catching some respite in a difficult year, a number of fintechs are planning to go public. In the UK there's CAB Payments, Zilch and Smart. In San Francisco, there's eCommerce decacorn Instacart, which is planning to launch at a valuation of $10bn.

This will be an opportunity at last for Instacart employees to manifest their stock payments into cold hard cash. For the most senior employees, there's a lot of stock accrued and a lot of cold cash to be had. In 2023, multiple engineers and product managers at Instacart say they've received stock payments of $500k or more. On Levels.fyi, one Instacart product manager says he/she received $600k in stock.

However, it doesn't seem like they'll be receiving as much as they initially bargained for. Instacart has raised its asking price from $26-28 per share to $28-30 per share, but its expected valuation of is still well below its most recent $39bn valuation it gained following a funding round back in 2021.

This isn't surprising. Stripe founder John Collison, for example, has previously said his employees knew the company wasn't worth its $95bn valuation in 2023 as it took a near 50% valuation dip. 

How much money employees make from an IPO also depends on how soon they sell and how the stock performs longer term. During the recent ARM IPO, 'patient' stockholders who held until Friday earned far more than those who sold at launch.

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