The serendipity and strategy of equity incentives

Equity incentives work best when they collide with luck. No one at Revolut, SpaceX or Nvidia could have plotted the exact path, yet their employees are living proof that sometimes fortune favours those with employee stock, literally.

Revolut: fast liquidity

For Revolut employees, the serendipity has come not from an IPO but from repeat secondary sales. More than once, staff have been able to sell down stock and take money off the table. For some, that has meant buying a first flat in their twenties, a milestone well ahead of their peers in the banking sector. It is not just about the endgame; it is about creating opportunities to answer the life-changing “what if this takes off” question.

Yet there is a counterpoint. Revolut’s business model, digital-first, borderless banking with viral user growth, was always built for scale. Employees weren’t simply lucky; they chose to join an organisation designed to challenge incumbents and capture market share.

SpaceX: belief before liquidity

SpaceX employees have a very different equity story. For years, their stock was illiquid and volatile as the company pursued its interstellar mission. Staff had to wait, sometimes uneasily, as their paper wealth rose and fell with every rocket launch.

Eventually, liquidity came through carefully managed secondary sales, but only after long periods of endurance. Employees weren’t just holding equity, they were holding a vision. They signed up knowing that cashing out might take a decade or more, but that the journey itself, reusable rockets, Mars ambitions, private space flight, could redefine an industry.

Here, the serendipity was not timing but conviction: equity in SpaceX demanded belief first, liquidity later.

Nvidia: exponential surprise

Then there is Nvidia, where the real serendipity has been technological. Employees who received stock awards in the “quiet” GPU years could not have predicted that artificial intelligence would propel the company’s valuation into the stratosphere. What were once modest awards have become retirement-level stakes. This is equity serendipity at its purest: being in the right place at the right time when the world changes around you.

Yet look closer and the strategy was hiding in plain sight. Nvidia had long positioned GPUs as parallel-processing engines, with bets on data centres and deep learning well before the AI boom. The surprise was not the quality of the model, but the timing of the global AI inflection point.

Lessons for employers and employees

So is it serendipity or is it strategy? The truth is both. Equity incentives expose employees to the inherent asymmetry of growth businesses. Sometimes the upside feels like pure chance. At other times, it reflects the deliberate conviction of joining a business with a model capable of exponential scale.

For employers, the point is not just retention. Equity incentives distribute possibility, part luck, part foresight and that is why even conservative allocation models have a disproportionate motivational effect.

For employees, the takeaway is equally stark. Equity is not salary. It carries risk, it often lacks liquidity and it demands patience. But occasionally, through secondaries, through endurance or through sheer exponential surprise, it delivers returns that reframe lives.

And that is the duality of equity incentives: serendipity and strategy, two sides of the same coin.

At Burges Salmon, we help businesses and management teams design incentive structures that balance risk and reward, anticipate liquidity and capture both the strategy and the serendipity of equity.