Rafael Valle was in a bind. Laid off, staring at a 90-day countdown to exercise his stock options, and caught—frustratingly—in the middle of a corporate blackout period that froze any chance of selling those shares. The clock kept ticking. The options were vested, valuable in theory, but converting them to actual money felt like navigating a labyrinth in the dark.
So Valle did what engineers do when systems fail them. He built a new one.
The result is StrikeRates, a comparison platform for pre-IPO liquidity that aspires to be something like NerdWallet for equity financing—minus the affiliate commissions and sponsored placements that usually come with the territory. It's free for employees. It lists 21 liquidity providers side by side, breaking down fees and deal structures with the kind of transparency that's rarely been available in the murky world of secondary stock sales.
Valle's personal ordeal wasn't unique, turns out. According to Carta's 2022 Employee Stock Options Report, startup employees walked away from more than $1.8 billion in fully vested stock options during 2022 alone. That same year, 46.1% of all in-the-money options expired unexercised. The problem isn't indecision—it's opacity, paired with the brutal mechanics of post-termination exercise windows that can slam shut before employees figure out their next move.
The Liquidity Maze
Valle, a senior software engineer at Flock Safety who's based in Miami, traces the platform directly to that liquidity crisis. When you leave a startup, the standard drill gives you 90 days to exercise your incentive stock options. Miss that window and they convert to non-qualified stock options, triggering different—often worse—tax treatment. But exercising can mean fronting tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars with no guarantee you'll ever see a return, especially if the company is years from an exit.
The experience clarified a contradiction Valle kept circling back to: employees shoulder concentrated risk in illiquid assets, yet the information they need to manage that risk is scattered, inconsistent, or deliberately vague.
His research into secondaries revealed an ecosystem that was equal parts sophisticated and inscrutable. There are FINRA-registered marketplaces like Augment, which charges a combined 2.5% fee with a $25,000 minimum for direct sales. There's Zanbato's ZX network, an institutional trading system connecting more than 220 trading groups. And there are non-recourse financing specialists offering loans backed by your shares—products with names like "variable prepaid forward contracts" that sound like they were designed to confuse.
StrikeRates catalogs all of it. Each provider profile includes fee structures, approval requirements, headquarters location. The platform centers on three modules: an equity modeler that runs scenarios across self-funding, non-recourse loans, forwards, tender offers, and direct secondaries; liquidity scenario modeling; and that provider directory, which now includes user reviews. You can access everything without creating an account, a deliberate choice that signals Valle's aversion to data harvesting.
Early engagement has been... modest, but not trivial. Valle reported in a Reddit post that within the first 48 hours after launch, five employees signed up representing roughly $2.5 million in equity value. Average session time in the first week hit 24.5 minutes, suggesting users were actually reading the detailed comparisons rather than bouncing immediately. By early April, six employees and more than $3.3 million had cycled through.
Monetization Without the Usual Tradeoffs
Valle's revenue model breaks with convention. "Revenue comes from the fund side, never the employee side," he explained in a launch thread. Institutional funds pay a flat monthly SaaS fee to access the platform's API infrastructure. All employee-facing tools remain free.
It's a bet that neutrality has commercial value—that funds will pay for structured access to aggregated employee demand rather than competing for eyeballs through affiliate kickbacks. No named fund customers appear on the public site yet, which raises questions about whether the model can scale before runway runs out. The homepage notes the platform is in "Phase 0 demand validation," startup-speak for we're still figuring this out.
That zero-commission stance is pointed, particularly now. Many comparison sites monetize by steering traffic to partners who pay for leads. Valle's setup preserves independence but requires convincing institutional players that the API access justifies recurring fees—a tougher sell than skimming transaction flow.
Educational Ambitions
Beyond the directory, StrikeRates houses a library of plain-language guides grounded in SEC regulations and Internal Revenue Code references. The "Liquidity 101" section tackles mechanics that trip up even sophisticated employees: how IPO lock-up periods interact with 10b5-1 cooling-off rules, the tax consequences when ISOs convert to NSOs, the structure of variable prepaid forward contracts under IRS Revenue Ruling 2003-7.
One guide walks through the "modification trap" under IRC Section 424(h), where extending a post-termination exercise window can inadvertently trigger unfavorable tax treatment. Another explains RSU liquidity advances—non-recourse financing against double-trigger restricted stock units that require board approval and create liens on settlement proceeds.
Valle describes the content as "research on 20+ providers" paired with regulatory context. The disclaimers are prominent, repeated across provider pages and the footer: StrikeRates is not a broker-dealer, investment advisor, or tax advisor. It doesn't execute securities transactions or collect transaction-based compensation. The language positions the company as "a technology and information infrastructure platform for private-market equity workflows," a mouthful that sounds lawyered-up for good reason.
Riding a Wave, Maybe
The timing aligns with a broader surge in private secondary markets. Pre-IPO trading volume has climbed sharply in recent years as companies stay private longer and employees seek liquidity before traditional exits. Morgan Stanley's acquisition of EquityZen, followed by fee reductions, signals Wall Street's recognition that secondary liquidity is moving from niche service to mainstream wealth management. Forge Global touts more than 27,000 private market transactions across 600-plus companies. Hiive and Rainmaker Securities have expanded their employee-facing footprints after facilitating substantial transaction volumes.
That competition makes Valle's neutrality play both strategic and risky. Strategic because employees are drowning in conflicting information and sponsored content. Risky because building a two-sided marketplace—free for one side, subscription-based for the other—requires critical mass on both ends before the flywheel spins.
Valle is building in public, posting updates to subreddits like r/buildinpublic and engaging in r/fatFIRE threads where employees debate pre-IPO secondary sale decisions. The approach mirrors his product philosophy: transparency over polish, utility over hype. Product Hunt shows modest traction—single-digit upvotes and followers in the early weeks. The X/Twitter account joined recently with posts tracking the launch but hasn't built significant reach yet.
The Waiting Game
For employees sitting on illiquid equity—whether facing a post-termination deadline, evaluating a tender offer, or planning around an eventual IPO lock-up—StrikeRates offers something that arguably didn't exist before: a starting point that isn't trying to sell you a specific solution.
Whether that's enough depends on parallel bets playing out simultaneously. Bet one: that employees will value unbiased comparison tools enough to make them a default resource, returning when decisions loom. Bet two: that funds will pay for structured access to that demand signal rather than waiting for employees to show up on their own doorsteps.
Valle's own experience suggests the problem is real. The $1.8 billion in expired options from 2022—just one year's worth of forfeited value—backs him up. The question is whether clarity alone can compete in a market where information asymmetry has long favored the sell side.
The solution is live, free, and unproven. Valle is watching to see if the rest of the market agrees that transparency is worth building—and paying for.
