Oren Barzilai Is Turning Startup Equity’s Fine Print Into an Exit Door

The most expensive part of a startup job offer is often printed as if it were a gift. Stock options arrive with an optimistic number, a vesting schedule and the atmospheric promise that everyone will win together. Then an employee leaves. A deadline starts. To turn the options into shares, the employee may have to produce more cash than sits in an ordinary bank account - and pay tax on an asset that still cannot be sold. The gift has developed an invoice.

Oren Barzilai has spent much of his career inside that contradiction. He is the co-founder and CEO of Equitybee, a platform built to connect employees who need money to exercise their options with investors seeking access to private companies. The arrangement is not a conventional loan. Investors fund the exercise in return for an agreed portion of the potential future gain; if the shares never produce a return, the risk sits with the investment rather than becoming ordinary personal debt.

The mechanism belongs to finance. The motivation is more personal. Barzilai had been the founder promising ownership, the colleague watching people undervalue it and the operator who later saw exactly what had been left behind.

First came the code

Barzilai was born and raised in Tel Aviv. Technology caught him early enough that “childhood interest” understates the commercial intent. He taught himself to code and was being paid to write software at 13. His parents let him use his bar mitzvah money to start a small business, an act of familial confidence that stayed with him. He later credited them with making education feel both important and practical: knowledge was something to acquire, then put to work.

Mathematics at Tel Aviv University was a natural continuation. So was software engineering, including a stint at VeriFone. Yet the cleaner line through his career is not employee to executive. It is builder to builder to builder. He co-founded Tapingo, a mobile-commerce service that let college students order food for pickup and delivery, and served as its chief technology officer. He then co-founded Start A Fire with childhood friend Oded Golan, building a social-marketing tool intended to give credit to people who discovered and shared content.

Tapingo eventually sold to Grubhub for $150 million in 2018. Acquisitions invite champagne and clean retrospective stories. Barzilai’s memory of the celebration is messier. He invited employees from different chapters of the company, looked around the room and began calculating. This person might have received roughly half a million dollars. Another might have received more. Some people who had helped create the outcome had left without exercising their options and therefore without the shares.

The arithmetic spoiled the neatness. He remembered a blunt reaction: this was not fair; somebody should fix the system. He wrote the idea down. For a while, it remained only that.

One expensive stranger

The idea returned at a technology event, embodied by a stranger facing a very real deadline. The employee needed about $200,000 to exercise his options. Lose the deadline, lose the equity. Barzilai knew investors, made connections and got the exercise funded. Then the employee sent a friend. The friend sent two more.

That sequence is the small, useful beauty in the founding story. Equitybee did not begin as a diagram of a two-sided marketplace. It began with one person unable to cross a gap and another person willing to supply capital if the terms made sense. Barzilai handled the awkward transaction by hand. Referrals did the market research.

In 2018, Barzilai founded Equitybee in Israel with Golan and another childhood friend, Mody Radashkovich. The old friendship is more than charming founder trivia. Marketplaces strain under questions of trust, judgment and disputed incentives. Starting one with people who have known each other since childhood does not eliminate those tensions, but it gives the argument a longer memory.

The company expanded into the United States in 2020 and moved its headquarters to Silicon Valley. The following year brought a $20 million Series A led by Group 11, then a $55 million Series B just seven months later. By the latter round, Equitybee said its investor network included about 12,000 participants. Its current company FAQ says the broader community has grown beyond 40,000 startup employees and accredited investors across the United States and Israel.

The ten-for-one illusion

Barzilai’s favorite evidence for the problem is almost comic. A private company once performed a ten-for-one share split: every share became ten, while each new share was worth one-tenth of the old one. Nobody became richer. When Barzilai asked why, the CEO explained that candidates kept comparing competing offers by the number of options. Explaining that percentage ownership and value mattered more was tiresome. Making the number larger was easier.

The story contains a small scandal of presentation. Smart people can be excellent at their jobs and still treat option grants as ceremonial tokens. A salary increase has immediate units. Private-company equity demands fluency in strike prices, valuations, dilution, taxes, exercise windows and uncertain exits. People naturally pay attention to the number they understand.

For Barzilai, education therefore sits beside financing, not beneath it. He has argued for financial and technical education to begin early, because both compound. He has also urged employees to evaluate equity rather than treating it as decorative compensation. Equitybee’s language calls them “startup builders,” a choice that makes the moral claim explicit. They did not merely receive options. They helped create whatever those options might become.

A longer private life

The problem became more visible as technology companies stayed private longer. Public markets offer quoted prices and familiar exits. Private companies can generate enormous paper value while shares remain difficult to buy or sell. Employees live in the interval. Their options may vest on schedule, but the company’s liquidity schedule belongs to somebody else.

Equitybee connects that trapped value with another frustrated group: investors who have capital but limited access to specific venture-backed businesses. Its marketplace turns the mismatch into a contract. The employee keeps ownership and most of the potential upside. The investor receives exposure to a private company on agreed terms. No one is promised an ending. Startups fail, private investments are risky and liquidity may take years. The structure simply gives both parties a way to participate.

By late 2024, Barzilai said Equitybee had completed more than 5,700 investments across over 750 startup companies and processed more than 800 liquidity events. The company has since broadened its investor products, including portfolio approaches intended to spread exposure across private companies rather than betting on a single hoped-for unicorn. In 2026, Barzilai announced a dedicated fund partnership with Practical Venture Capital, whose team also joined as a strategic investor.

The evolution is telling. Equitybee began with a single option exercise and grew toward portfolios. Yet Barzilai keeps returning to individual outcomes: the employee who did not forfeit years of work, the investor who accepted the risk, the founder who finally learns that an options grant is neither cash nor confetti. Scale is reported in thousands of investments. Meaning still arrives one cap table at a time.

Ownership as a verb

Barzilai’s career has moved from writing software to designing markets, but the engineer’s instinct remains visible. Take an opaque system. Identify the point where ordinary users fail. Replace the dead end with a path. The path need not make the outcome certain; it only has to make action possible.

His most compact line is also Equitybee’s thesis: “You built it, own it.” It sounds like a slogan until the exercise notice arrives. Then every word becomes procedural. “Built” describes the labor already given. “Own” requires knowledge, a decision and frequently capital. The comma contains an entire fintech company.

There is ambition in Barzilai’s belief that early financial and technical education can give people an advantage. There is also a founder’s impatience. He has watched a company multiply its share count because teaching candidates was inconvenient. He has watched employees bargain over a few hundred dollars in salary while ignoring the equity package. And he has watched an acquisition party fill with people who helped make the celebration possible but could not fully share in it.

So he chose the unglamorous threshold between promise and ownership: the clock, the tax form, the exercise price and the hard question of where the money comes from. Silicon Valley prefers to discuss the future. Barzilai built for the moment the future sends an invoice.