Episode SummaryAlexei 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 Alexei 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 verbalizes: who gets equity, how much, and why you have an ESOP plan in the first place. You'll also hear how he modeled 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. Alexei closes with his Big Cojones moment: proposing to his wife, the most nervous he's ever been despite having climbed Europe's highest mountain. Time Stamps00:00 – Intro 03:01 – The three ESOP questions every founder needs to answer 05:58 – How to model equity allocation across rounds and hundreds of hires 09:10 – Using ESOP as your most powerful recruitment and retention tool 12:02 – How walking 200 employees through their equity built culture and trust 15:02 – Open financials, shrinking cash balances, and what went wrong along the way 17:55 – Why Australia's ESOP ecosystem is still behind Silicon Valley 26:48 – Teaching employees to understand equity: the Google Sheet that started at zero 29:20 – High salary vs heavy equity: giving employees a real choice 32:16 – Common ESOP mistakes founders make and how to avoid them 35:03 – Why Australians treat startup equity like monopoly money 39:11 – The secondary market problem: why liquidity changes everything for ESOP 43:25 – Why your startup career is a portfolio of equity bets 46:36 – What angel investors can do to help portfolio companies build better ESOP plans Sponsors:First Cheque is supported by our wonderful sponsors:Deel: Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, and get visas handled fast, so you stay focused on scaling. Deel takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits, and compliance, so your team can grow without borders. It’s why more than 40,000 fast-growing companies trust Deel to move fast. Visit https://www.deel.com/dayone ___ Pear Tree: Pear Tree helps Australian and New Zealand founders build high-performing offshore teams without the agency middleman. As local hiring becomes more expensive and harder to fill, many operators are turning to offshore talent across engineering, development, marketing, accounting and operations at a fraction of local salary costs. The offshore horror stories you hear usually aren’t a talent problem. They’re the result of outsourcing agencies that overcharge clients while underpaying staff. Pear Tree takes a different approach through a direct, transparent model where your team is paid fairly, fully compliant, and focused entirely on your business. As part of the Day One community, you’ll receive a free team audit to identify where offshore talent could move the needle in your business, plus 20% off your first hire. Learn more at http://dayone.fm/peartree First Cheque is part of Day One.Day One helps founders and startup operators make better business decisions more often. To learn more, join our newsletter to be notified of new First Cheque episodes and upcoming shows. Mentioned in this episode: Deel x PX_Script 1 Deel x PX_Script 2 Pear Tree If you're a founder or operator trying to scale, here's the reality — Australian hiring is getting harder, salaries are at record highs, and the talent you need is increasingly out of reach. The best operators are quietly building offshore teams of engineers, marketers, accountants and analysts at a fraction of the cost. Pear Tree does it differently. We headhunt highly skilled talent from the Philippines and South Africa with full transparency on where every dollar goes, so your team is paid fairly and fully focused on your business. As a Day One listener, you’ll receive a free team audit to identify where offshore talent could move the needle in your business, plus 20% off your first hire. This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp Spotify Ad Analytics - https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/ad-analytics-privacy-policy/
