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Can a UK limited company grant options easily? What is the law regarding using equity with vesting plans to pay employees? For a startup equity is most likely the only way of aligning employees with the mission long term.

Can a limited company easily issue shares and issue preferred stock for VC's. I know american VC's love preferred stock but how common is this in the UK?

I read here: Can a UK Limited company (with standard articles) issue options? How common is it to issue new shares in an LTD?

And finally how easy is it for an LTD to go public, particularly IPO's?

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For options, you should take a look at the HMRC site for Enterprise Management Incentives (EMI) - that's the most tax-efficient way to do employee options. You should probably use an accountant to set them up, it will cost £2,000 or so but it's not really something you can safely do yourself.

Issuing shares is easy, I don't know about preferred stock but can't think of any reason it would be difficult.

Public companies are pretty much invariably PLCs, I can't think of any exceptions offhand. However, if and when it gets to that stage then there will be specialists who can take you through the process of converting from a Limited company to a PLC. There's no value that I can think of in starting off as a PLC, and many disadvantages (more paperwork etc.).

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