# PTE = Vesting

Author:

Henry Ward

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Read time:

1 minute

Published date:

February 10, 2017

Carta decided to change PTE to coincide with an employee's vesting schedule. This gives Carta employees more freedom when exercising shares.

_Note: this post reflects our old vesting schedule, our new one can be_ [_found here_](/content/learn/startups/compensation/offer-letter/index.html)_._

Most companies use the default [Post-termination Exercise (PTE) periods](/content/learn/startups/compensation/offer-letter/index.html) from their law firm’s equity documents. PTE periods are 90 days or less because option grants lose their ISO status after 90 days. The attorneys who wrote these plans in the 1990s were too lazy to manually convert the ISOs to NSOs, so they solved the problem by expiring these grants at 90 days.

These agreements have been copied and re-used for 20 years. Today 96% of all option agreements on Carta have PTE periods of 90 days or less. Punitive and short PTE periods are the norm.

We fixed this at Carta by matching PTE to vesting. Below is an overview of our new PTE. I hope this post will encourage other companies to use our PTE model or create their own.

## The Old Model

## Our New Model

Author: [Henry Ward](/content/author/henry-ward/index.html)

Henry Ward is the CEO and co-founder of Carta.