A salary of $85,000 plus options to buy 30,000 shares of common stock it sounded like a reasonable deal to Leanne Gallagher. It was April 1999, and Gallagher was being recruited to join a start-up venture, MoniMed. The company, which had already been in operation for two years, made medical monitoring devices. Marc Cornwall, the director of engineering, who interviewed Gallagher, said the company was expected to go public within the year. If Gallagher took the job, she would be joining the 30-person firm as a senior software engineer. She had been working at an established corporation for 15 years and had recently completed her master's degree. Now she felt ready for a more demanding challenge. Of course, she was currently making $105,000 a year, but she was willing to risk the salary differential on stock in what looked like a viable concern. MoniMed had a strategy that would take advantage of imminent changes in at panel display technology. But the company had to get its product to market within the next 12 months to exploit this niche market. Gallagher thought she was just the person to kick the manufacturing arm of the company into high gear. As far as the stock went, 30,000 options at 30 cents a share seemed like a good offer though she had no way of knowing for sure. She had asked what percentage of the total outstanding shares her options represented, but Cornwall didn't have that information. None of the employees, he said, really knew what percentage of the stock they owned, but all the IPOs had been doing so well recently that everyone assumed they would come out ahead. Although Gallagher knew from other engineers that a failure to share financial information was not uncommon at Silicon Valley start-ups, she hoped to be a little better informed before she accepted the offer. She learned from a friend with an MBA that all corporations in California had to file certain information about their boards of directors and stock plans with the secretary of state's office. She decided to contact that office and request information on MoniMed