This blog post was inspired by a question I answered on Quora.... What is Starter Stock or "FF-Shares" A class of shares separate from common stock that entrepreneurs can receive when founding a company. These shares can be sold into a financing round allowing an entrepreneur to cash out a subset of their shares without impacting the value of common stock (which is usually worth about 1/4 the value of preferred and, if vanilla common stock is sold into a financing event would negatively impact option grant prices for employees)