Better Stack buys back ESOP shares for over $5 million

San Francisco, November 12, 2025. Better Stack, a software observability startup building developer tools, is buying back ESOP (”employee stock option pool”) shares from its team for over $5 million.

"Startup stock options are one of the key reasons why Silicon Valley is so successful in creating valuable companies," comments Juraj Masar, co-founder and CEO.

"In Europe, however, candidates often still prefer cash over stock options, as they don't personally know anyone who has sold stock options at a profit," confirms Veronika Kolejakova, co-founder.

With this step, Better Stack is demonstrating to its team and potential candidates that stock options in the company carry real value — and team members don't have to wait until the company is acquired or goes public to see a return.

"Startups today often fail to communicate stock options well in their offers — and candidates don't know what to expect. Either their expectations are unrealistic, or they barely value the options at all. Candidates should look at stock options from an investor's perspective: after all, instead of capital, they are investing their time. It’s crucial that candidates understand basic concepts such as vesting and cliff, 409a valuation and strike price or early exercise, liquidation preference, and dilution. Without understanding these concepts, they cannot assess the value of an offer from a startup."

Masar says that from the beginning, Better Stack set up its stock options pool in an employee-friendly way: "Instead of the usual 90-day exercise window from the moment a person leaves the company, we set it at 10 years so that candidates don't have to deal with exercising their options if they decide to leave the company early."

Better Stack has raised over $28 million from VC investors including Kaya, Creandum, Susa Ventures, K5 Global, and Credo. "The company is unintentionally profitable, all of the VC funding is in the bank, and our investors understand how crucial it is for the business to motivate the team," Masar explains. The company therefore decided to buy back shares from the early team for a total of $5.2 million.

"The media primarily celebrates when a company raises a large investment round. However, with each large investment round, a startup issues 15-20% of new shares and dilutes existing shareholders. If it cannot generate a significant return on investment on the money raised, stock options for the team, even in companies valued at billions of dollars on paper, can be worthless because all the money goes to investors when the company gets acquired," explains Masar. "That’s why it’s completely appropriate to openly ask a startup representative when considering a job offer: 'If the company is sold in two years at a valuation of X, how much money will I take home?' The answer to this question needs to account for investment terms, such as 'liquidation preference', which are not reported on in the media but nevertheless have a huge impact on the value of the options.”

About Better Stack

Better Stack is building a radically better observability stack. Better Stack makes monitoring distributed systems using the OpenTelemetry standard easy as teams don’t need to modify the application code thanks to its eBPF agent. Simply put, Better Stack calls you when your website goes down and provides your developers with everything they need to identify and fix the issue as quickly as possible. Thanks to its proprietary infrastructure, Better Stack offers tracing, log management, and infrastructure monitoring at a 97% lower price than competing tools.

Founded in 2021 by Veronika Kolejakova and Juraj Masar, Better Stack has a distributed team in 10 countries around the world. In 2022, it won the Forbes startup of the year award. Better Stack raised $28.6 million in venture capital from prestigious global investors such as Kaya, Creandum, Susa, Credo, and K5 Global, and has been profitable since 2024.

In October 2025, Better Stack drew attention by introducing "hardcore mode" when it allowed its team members to work 1.5 times more hours per week for double the pay.