Your ESOPs are worth money today — not just on paper.

The four routes to liquidity

Every ESOP holder's cash-out happens through one of four doors, and knowing which are open to you right now is the first real step:

• An IPO or acquisition — the default plan, and entirely outside your control. Great when it happens; unknowable when.
• A company-run buyback or tender — the company (or an investor it invites) purchases employee shares at a set price. Convenient, but the company chooses the timing, price and caps.
• A secondary sale — you sell your vested shares to an outside buyer through the unlisted market. The only route where you pick the timing.
• Holding on — a legitimate choice, as long as it's a decision and not a default.

Why concentration is the real problem

For many startup employees, vested equity quietly becomes the single largest line on their personal balance sheet — bigger than savings, bigger than a house deposit. That's a concentration no adviser would ever recommend building on purpose: one company, one sector, zero liquidity, and your salary depends on the same firm. If the company stumbles, your income and your net worth fall together.

Seen through that lens, selling part of a vested position isn't disloyalty or a bet against the company — it's ordinary portfolio hygiene. Founders and VCs take money off the table in secondary rounds routinely; employees are simply the last group to learn the same move.

Sell some, keep some: sizing the sale

The choice isn't binary. A useful mental model is to split the holding into what each rupee is for. Money you need on a known date — a home down-payment, a wedding, a runway for a startup of your own — has no business staying in a single illiquid stock; sell that portion when demand exists. Money that is genuinely long-term risk capital can stay and ride the company's upside.

Many employees land between twenty and fifty percent for a first sale: enough to bank a life-changing amount and cover any exercise costs and taxes, while keeping meaningful exposure. There is no formula — but "how much do I need, by when, with certainty?" is a better question than "what will the price be at IPO?", because only one of those has a knowable answer.

Timing: demand comes in cycles

Unlisted-market demand isn't constant. Interest in a company's shares swells around funding rounds, strong results, sector momentum or IPO speculation — and goes quiet in between. Sellers who wait for a personal deadline to force the sale often meet the market at its quietest; sellers who list their intent early get matched when the next demand cycle arrives.

This is also why an indicative valuation costs you nothing but tells you a lot: it reveals whether demand for your company's shares exists today, at what level, and lets you set a floor you'd accept. If today's answer is thin, a waitlisted ask means the phone rings when that changes.

Employed vs departed: your position differs

Current employees usually hold a mix of vested and unvested options, can exercise on a relaxed timeline, and mostly need discretion — which a targeted, non-public sale process provides. Former employees face the opposite shape: whatever vested is all there will ever be, and if options are unexercised, a lapse deadline is running. The mechanics of selling are the same for both; the urgency is not.

Either way, the sequence that works is: valuation first, decision second, exercise (if needed) third, transfer last — with the money arriving within T+2 working days of the transfer. The order matters more than the speed.