How to negotiate a good salary in Silicon Valley

In 2011, Vaibhav Mallya graduated from the University of Michigan with a computer science degree and took a job offer from Amazon, where he had been an intern.

Mallya was young, wasn't from the Valley, and he didn’t know how to negotiate for salary.

So unsurprisingly, one day he was having drinks with a co-worker and discovered his friend "was making much more money than me," Mallya told Business Insider.

He attributed the pay difference to the fact that "he was a much better engineer than me."

But it rankled him. After a couple of years at Amazon, he started looking around for a new engineering job in the Valley.

"I interviewed for 15-20 places, answered about 80–100 interview questions," he said. "I got a number of offers and figured out how things worked."

Mallya eventually took a job at Twitter and negotiated a much more satisfactory salary. When his friends learned about his success they started coming to him for help when they got job offers.

For instance, a friend who had received several offers and was given a "menu" of options, ranging from a higher salary with less equity to a lower salary coupled with greater equity.

This is pretty common from startups, Mallya explained. "$100,000 and 1% equity, $90,000 and 2%, that sort of thing. But if a startup is willing to part with a menu, they are often willing to part with top salary and more equity," he said.

Mallya told his friend to tell the companies, "I’m happy to look back in a month after I explore these other opportunities. Or if you give me an upside right now (high salary, high equity), I’ll accept right now." Sure enough, she got an offer with high pay and more stock options.

These experiences have caused Mallya to quit Twitter and launch his own talent agency called Code Insider.

And because he’s an engineer himself, he's now turning what he learned into an online startup, called Offer Drive.

His goal is to make it similar to Glassdoor but focused on offer letters.

Offer Drive lets people share information on their offers to see how those offers stack up.

Mallya says a good negotiator for an engineering job in the Valley could walk away with a 15% to 20% bigger compensation package than an original offer, particularly in stock options that could be worth millions one day.

He says anyone can negotiate better if they follow a few pro tips:

1. Be patient. "Whoever controls time is the one who controls outcome," he says. Don't rush to say yes or no. And don't buy into "exploding offers" which he calls "BS."

Be patient. "Whoever controls time is the one who controls outcome."

2. Understand Valley speak. Companies want to hear that you are "passionate" about their "mission."

Mallya says tech companies like to see themselves as changing the world in a very specific way, and like to see their employees as evangelists for this change, not just talented hard workers. Find out who they are "trying to disrupt." If their tech really does excite you, tell them you "believe in the mission."

"To people outside the Silicon Valley culture, the whole language used here is foreign," Mallya says.

3. Understand yourself. If you are not really excited about the tech, don't take the job. Getting that top offer is all about "understanding yourself and what you like, what sorts of people you like working with," Mallya says. If you are truly psyched and have the right skills, they'll want you as much as you want them, and be willing to pay you well.

4. Don’t do their negotiation for them. You don’t have to answer questions about how much you are paid at your current job, especially if you feel you are underpaid. Try to deflect such questions and if that doesn’t work, direct the conversation to the salary range you want them to offer. Mallya shares more details about how to do that in a recent blog post.