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It certainly worked out for me," claims Edward Esber, a former marketing vice-president for VisiCorp in San Jose, Calif. Like many hired field workers in the sowing of new businesses, Esber had gambled on the eventual success of the embryonic enterprise with which he had cast his lot rather than seeking the haven of a larger, proven company. And he won -- big. When Dan Fylstra and Peter Jennings founded VisiCorp (then called Personal Software Inc.) in 1978, Esber was the first outsider to be granted stock. To help keep his energies from flagging in the tough early going of the still-private software company, he was granted liberal stock options that eventually were to reward him with a large percentage of VisiCorp stock. The lure made him keep his nose to the grindstone for more than three years while increasingly more equity became vested to his account. Last May, after putting in about 45 months of labor, Esber retired. "I'm now able not to have to work the rest of my life, if I decide to do that," he beams. Esber is 31 years old.

Giving away founder's stock as a means of first attracting key employees and then retaining them for as long as possible has rapidly become a way of fast-growth life among proliferating young companies competing for a limited amount of engineering and managerial talent. "The challenge of the '80s is to keep your key people," proclaims Alan F. Shugart, whose four-year-old Seagate Technology, of Scotts Valley, Calif., is particularly imaginative in devising ways of sharing the wealth. "There are only so many experienced disk-drive engineers to go around. How do you keep them down on the farm after they've seen Paree?"

The "Paree" he is referring to is being built from the gathering of venture money that has been piling higher and higher throughout the last few years, from $39 million in 1977 to an estimated $1.7 billion last year. By the close of 1983 more than $2 billion will undoubtedly have been involved in venture financing. This swelling mound of greenbacks represents a powerful economic force that, since 1980, has been forging small businesses, like a machine from the Industrial Revolution stamping out nuts and bolts. One by-product of the surge in start-ups has been that the new entities have, in turn, raided the ranks of established businesses for their front offices and laboratories.

Many of the fertile new ideas come from ex-employees of successful start-ups who, like Esber (now in the process of writing a business plan for his own venture), have struck it rich from having even a modest amount of equity therein. Apple Computer Inc., of Cupertino, Calif., for example, was "pretty well spread around," as one insider put it, when the company went public in December 1980, at $22 a share. Apple is reputed to have created a couple of dozen millionaires among its employees on that occasion, and already some have left to organize their own companies. At 3Com Corp., a private, four-year-old, high-technology corporation in Mountain View, Calif., founder and chairman Bob Metcalfe predicts that "an engineer here can expect -- assuming we make our business plan and the world doesn't come to an end -- to own between a quarter and a half-million dollars in stock by 1986." Of 3Com's 50 staff members, at least 25 are soon-to-be-blessed engineers. When the opportunity to cash out arises, undoubtedly some of them, too, will be off to gay Paree -- which these days is doing business as downtown Palo Alto.

Clearly, the chance that the stock of a small private company or an early-stage public company will be worth considerably more in the not-too-distant future has been an offer not easily refused by employees who stand to be given some of it by the entrepreneurial team. Indeed, the top ranks of some firmly ensconced public companies with far fewer get-rich-quick opportunities to offer key employees -- their stock is comparatively fully priced in the public marketplace and is not apt to appreciate dramatically -- have been well picked over. But IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, even PepsiCo, and any number of other Big Board businesses have managed to survive the loss of valuable employees. A few, like Texas Instruments Inc. and National Semiconductor Corp., have been noticeably shaken; if the raiding continues, many more could be also.

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