From Startup to Acquisition: Building an Equity Platform End-to-End
Designing global equity from zero to acquisition — first as Easop, then integrated inside Remote's platform for 10,000+ HR teams.
Built Easop's product from the ground up as the sole designer — designing the grant creation flow, employee-facing equity portal, vesting schedules, and compliance layer for 70+ countries. Designed across three distinct user personas: People/Finance admins, board members, and international employees — each with completely different mental models of what equity means. Helped grow and exit the company in under two years as an eight-person team, earning an acquisition by Remote. Mapped the conceptual seam between Easop's equity-as-finance model and Remote's employment-as-compensation model — designing a unified experience that felt native to both. Designed the integrated employee equity view, threading cap table data into Remote's HR and payroll flows without disrupting either. Ran user research with HR admins across six markets to validate mental models and surface terminology mismatches early.
Same product. Two different worlds.
Easop was built to make global equity simple — letting companies grant compliant stock options across 70+ countries without lawyers, paperwork, or delays. I joined as the third employee and only designer, and designed every screen from scratch: the grant creation flow, the employee portal, vesting visualizations, and the compliance framework that made it all feel trustworthy.
When Remote acquired Easop in 2024, the challenge shifted. The acquired tool thought in terms of “grants,” “vesting schedules,” and “cap tables.” Remote’s platform thinks in terms of “employees,” “contracts,” and “payroll runs.” These aren’t just different vocabularies — they reflect entirely different mental models of what equity is and who owns it.
Reconciling both — for the HR admin on screen and the engineering team under the hood — was the real design problem. We couldn’t simply re-skin Easop. We had to find the conceptual seam where these two worlds could meet naturally, and design outward from there.
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