I agree with Dagon that the most straightforward solution is simply to sell your equity as soon as it vests. If you don’t do anything else then I think at least you should do that—it’s a good idea just on the basis of diversification, not even considering conflicts of interest.
I think you should be willing to take quite a large loss to divest. In a blog post, I estimated that for an investor with normal-ish risk aversion, it’s worth paying ~4% per year to avoid the concentration risk of holding a single mega-cap stock (so you’re willing to pay more to get rid of stock that vests later). Then add the conflict-of-interest factor on top of that. How much COI matters depends on how much influence you have over Google’s AI policy and how much you think you’ll be swayed by monetary incentives. My guess is the COI factor matters less than 4% per year but that’s not based on anything concrete.
“[Google’s Insider Trading Policy] describes company-wide policies that address the risks of insider trading, such as a prohibition on any Google employee hedging Google stock”: I read this as saying you can’t hedge Google stock based on insider information, not that you can’t hedge it at all. But I don’t know what the law says about hedging stock in your employer.
A few miscellaneous thoughts:
I agree with Dagon that the most straightforward solution is simply to sell your equity as soon as it vests. If you don’t do anything else then I think at least you should do that—it’s a good idea just on the basis of diversification, not even considering conflicts of interest.
I think you should be willing to take quite a large loss to divest. In a blog post, I estimated that for an investor with normal-ish risk aversion, it’s worth paying ~4% per year to avoid the concentration risk of holding a single mega-cap stock (so you’re willing to pay more to get rid of stock that vests later). Then add the conflict-of-interest factor on top of that. How much COI matters depends on how much influence you have over Google’s AI policy and how much you think you’ll be swayed by monetary incentives. My guess is the COI factor matters less than 4% per year but that’s not based on anything concrete.
“[Google’s Insider Trading Policy] describes company-wide policies that address the risks of insider trading, such as a prohibition on any Google employee hedging Google stock”: I read this as saying you can’t hedge Google stock based on insider information, not that you can’t hedge it at all. But I don’t know what the law says about hedging stock in your employer.