How to Negotiate Equity and Stock Options at a Singapore or Hong Kong Startup

Equity offers at Singapore and Hong Kong startups run on the same fundamentals as anywhere else — but the market context around them is different enough that treating advice written for Silicon Valley as directly applicable will leave you asking the wrong questions.

The fundamentals don't change

Whatever the region, the same handful of numbers determine whether an equity offer is actually meaningful:

• Number of shares or options, and what percentage of the company that represents on a fully-diluted basis — not just the raw share count, which is meaningless on its own without knowing total shares outstanding.
• Strike price relative to the last valuation. A low strike price relative to a rising valuation is where the upside actually comes from; ask directly what the strike price is and when it was last set.
• Vesting schedule and cliff. The near-universal default is four years with a one-year cliff, meaning you get nothing if you leave before your first anniversary and then vest monthly or quarterly after that. Confirm this explicitly rather than assuming it matches the default — some Singapore and Hong Kong startups vary it.
• What happens to unvested equity if you leave, are let go, or the company is acquired. Acceleration clauses on acquisition are not universal — ask.

If a recruiter can't answer these questions specifically, that's itself useful information about how mature the company's equity program actually is.

Why comp data here needs more legwork

In the US, sites like Levels.fyi and public compensation surveys give you a reasonably reliable anchor for what a given equity grant is worth relative to market. That kind of standardized, crowdsourced data is thinner for Singapore and Hong Kong — there are far fewer data points per company and level, and startup equity in particular is rarely reported with enough detail to compare cleanly across companies at different stages.

That means leaning more heavily on direct comparisons than a single salary site: talk to a recruiter who places candidates at comparable-stage startups in the region, or to peers who've actually seen offers at similar companies, rather than trusting one aggregator's number as gospel. If you can, ask the company directly how your equity grant compares — as a percentage, not a share count — to what they've offered other hires at your level in the last six to twelve months. A company confident in its equity program will usually give you a straight answer.

Company stage changes what you should be asking for

• Early-stage (seed to Series A). Equity is a larger share of total compensation, and the risk is correspondingly higher — the company might not exist in three years. Push harder on the percentage and on getting the strike price and cap table context in writing, since these numbers matter more here than at a later-stage company.
• Growth-stage (Series B and later). Equity is more standardized by level, and the company likely has cleaner data on what it's granted before. This is where directly asking "what's the typical grant for this level" gets you furthest, because there's an actual internal pattern to compare against.
• Pre-IPO or already public. At this stage, equity behaves closer to cash — it's more liquid, more comparable across offers, and the negotiation looks more like negotiating a signing bonus or base salary and bonus than a genuine bet on the company's future.

Negotiating the grant itself

The same 10-20% framing that works for base salary in Singapore tech applies reasonably well here too — asking for meaningfully more shares, or a shorter cliff, is a realistic ask if you frame it against a specific reference point (a competing offer, a comparable role you've heard about, or a scope difference from what was initially described). Asking for a materially different equity structure altogether — say, requesting acceleration clauses a company has never granted anyone — is a harder ask and worth knowing going in that it may simply not be something they do.

If equity is being used to make up for a lower base salary or in place of a signing bonus, treat that explicitly as a trade-off worth discussing on its own terms rather than accepting it as a package deal — our guide on negotiating a signing bonus covers the cash side of that same trade.

Get it in writing before you decide

Verbal descriptions of equity ("about half a percent") are not the same as an actual grant letter with share counts, strike price, and vesting terms. Ask for the specific numbers in writing before you make a final decision — a company that's genuinely offering meaningful equity will have no issue providing this.

Negotiating equity terms is still a live conversation, not a form you fill in — you're asking a founder or hiring manager pointed questions and pushing back on vague answers in real time. Prepair's salary negotiation practice lets you rehearse that kind of exchange with an AI counterpart before the real one, choosing how firm they play it and getting a scored readout afterward. It's Pro-tier and it's built to practice the conversation itself — it doesn't calculate vesting math or model your equity's expected value, but it's useful for getting comfortable pressing for specifics instead of nodding along to a vague number.