I've talked to CEOs that make offers focused on the number of shares / $ amount. They were happy to reveal the total size of the pool, when asked. I think if they didn't, that'd be an issue.
I've mentioned this before on HN, but I was at a start-up where we lost candidates because, in the candidates' words, the other company was giving 200,000 options, and we were only giving 500 options.[1] 200,000 would have been the entire company. [2]
I can totally believe that the CEO is giving the raw number because that's what the labor market has trained him to give.
[1] It's possible they were lying because they thought working for us would suck. It's not true that we were better off without these people because they didn't know basic economics and accounting. Lots of very good people don't have a clue how that stuff works.
[2] If I ever found another start-up I am going to go hog-wild and make quintillions of shares just as social commentary.
>2
The only reason that hasn't bee done is that (at least in MA) there is a fee per share created. Here it is $100/100k shares. That would make it very expensive to file your articles of incorporation (roughly 1 Quadrillion dollars)
