> considering yourself a "potential owner" when you're not invited to the meetings where owners decide things means you are very confused about things

Well gosh, I don't think there's any need to get nasty about it. I may be naive but give me a break. When I refer to ownership I'm obviously simply referring to being a shareholder. No, I am not invited to board meetings, but as far as I know, neither is anybody else who's not exec staff. Is this unusual?

The options are on common shares. Can you elaborate on schemes in which common shares are made to become worthless? I have been explicitly told that there are no liquidation preference multipliers on the preferred shares, and the valuation is well above where that would matter. So what sorts of shenanigans would make my shares worth less? Please be specific if you don't mind. It may be a dumb question, but just telling me I'm dumb isn't really getting the point across.

Regarding going to {GOOG,FB,AMZN,MSFT}, I've actually already been through a couple of those and experienced the "real compensation packages and stock plans" and got a couple pretty respectable windfalls out of them, but I've decided the tradeoffs aren't worth it. Job satisfaction absolutely can't be beat where I am, and that's worth a lot to me. That doesn't mean I don't wonder what my n% is actually worth and how specifically that works.

>>> If you have the options to buy common shares, which you probably do, they're worthless so don't even bother exercising them.

I was in the exact same position as the OP, with expiring options on common shares in a company with no immediate plans to IPO. I (fortunately) didn't take your advice, exercised the options and 3 years later, when we were acquired, I was $500k richer. Of course, everyone's situation is different but I wouldn't take such an absolute position.

Why do you think the common shares are worthless, if the company is worth 10x (to use the conservative number) the amount invested in it?

I think my inclination would be to exercise the options, because if I didn't, and they turned out to be worth something, I would just want to shoot myself. But this isn't necessarily a rational argument :-)

I think they're worthless because of the nature of liquidation preference. There are a select few elite startups like Dropbox that I would value common options at, but those companies will obviously IPO. Clearly the person who I responded to is at a company that is not going to IPO, exercising options is extremely expensive, and there are well known avenues to making common shares worth $0 and so it's an enormous financial risk. Again, if you're not invited to board meetings, how much do they value you, and how much do they consider you a co-owner and partner? If they don't, and you're in the dark about so much critical information, taking that financial risk is even more of a bad play.