PhonePe created $10bn value in 10 years. Esop holders to pocket $1.4bn of that
₹18,000 crore ($2 billion) in realised and potential equity value over the company’s lifecycle.Even if the company lists closer to $10.5 billion, a steeply marked down valuation at which the IPO is widely expected, the value of that pool could still be around ₹13,000 crore, or about $1.4 billion.Of that, the options that still exist today and can convert into shares in the future, could be worth roughly $500-600 million.While other tech firms also use Esops to retain top talent, PhonePe’s rewards to its employees have seeded at least half a dozen “deca-millionaires”, or very high-net-worth individuals, in its top deck.And thanks to the payments platform's extravagant Esop structure, its top leadership has stuck around from its early Flipkart-acquisition in 2016 to the cusp of its IPO. (Walmart Inc.
acquired Flipkart mid-2018 that made the US retailer a significant majority shareholder in PhonePe.)Chief financial officer Adarsh Nahata, head of strategy and investor relations Karthik Raghupathy, and lending services chief Hemant Gala joined between 2016 and 2018 from the Walmart-Flipkart ecosystem and continue at the helm.Nahata, Gala, and Raghupathy have been granted roughly 5.1 million stock options—worth about ₹1,193 crore at the last private valuation of about $14.5 billion—based on PhonePe’s updated draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) filed in January.Some of this wealth has already been realized. During the September funding round, investor General Atlantic bought shares from employees, providing them with an exit.
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