Currently on sale!

Bonobos, the popular e-tailer that launched in 2007 with the promise of a better-fitting pair of pants (ones that could hug CEO Andy Dunn's "surprisingly meaty thighs"), is raising a $15 million equity round. According to the company's latest Form D, Bonobos has already raised $7,999,973 toward that goal, with $7,000,027 still up for grabs.

The issuer is listed as Bonobos itself and not Mr. Dunn in particular. The equity is offered in "Series C-1 Preferred Stock and the common stock issuable upon conversion thereof," and the round is unrelated to a merger or acquisition.

The Form D says the date of the first sale was January 5th, 2012 and six investors have already signed up, so the round is closing fast. The last time Bonobos raised funding was December, 2010, when Accel Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners invested $18.5 million to help with customer acquisition.

Perhaps this latest round will go towards being able to support traffic from all those new customers. Bonobos experienced such an "epic fail" last Cyber Monday when 60 percent discounts drove traffic to 10x what was expected that questions regarding 404 errors, slowness, and false charges shot up to the top of Quora. But the entire staff pitched together to respond, including Mr. Dunn, who fielded phone calls until 3am and Director of Customer Experience, John Rote, described by some as a mythical hybrid of "man/unicorn."

Sorry?

Mark Pincus is not having a very good holiday season. An amended S-1 filing from last week showed a drop in net income, fewer daily active users, and slower revenue growth than previous quarters.

Absent a stock price, the filing seemed to indicate Zynga's IPO would be delayed until after Thanksgiving. But before he can dull his anxieties with tryptophan, the Wall Street Journal has another skeleton to drag out of the closet.

Apparently, Mr. Pincus has been threatening a few early employees he deemed unworthy to return the Zynga stock they were given or risk being fired and lose all their unvested stock.

Doling out company stock in lieu of salary is par for the course of a startup. But with an IPO on the line that could value the company at close to $20 billion, suddenly that sweat equity was looking a little too lucrative for early employees that aren't pulling their weight. Especially when it can be spent attracting new talent.

To try to avoid a situation like Google, where a company chef ended up with $20 million in stock, the Journal says Mr. Pincus started making a list of employees whose performance at the company failed to justify, in his eyes, their restricted shares. Demands to return stock were only pointed at share grants that had not been vested, however some of those eligible for backsies had grants worth tens of millions. Among Mr. Pincus various lists was one called "MIA" for those contributions to the team were "missing in action."

For a CEO who makes the financial success of each game available to employees in real time, it was an attempt to combat the notion of  "rest and vest."

However, Mr. Pincus was known for renting out a theater for all-staff meetings to bestow restricted shares and promotions on employees who met their goal, the company has been very hush-hush about this practice. Perhaps that's because it lies in a legal gray area that could open up the company to employment litigation.

This yes-backsies! policy is starting to become more common among fast-growth startups with lawyers reporting an increased in instances, although its legality has yet to be tested in court.

Beyond a lawsuit, the real danger says the Journal might be devaluing the notion of equity as a recruitment tool altogether. Either that, or Mr. Pincus just invented a best motivational strategy ever.

"Fairness, and the perception of fairness, is more valuable than owning a large stake," writes Joel Spolsky, in answer to this question, on the Stack Exchange vertical OnStartups. That's an interesting formulation, since it implies that that what is truly equitable will not always appear so, and that the perception of the outside world is equally meaningful.

There will be drama, write Spolsky:

"Almost everything that can go wrong in a startup will go wrong, and one of the biggest things that can go wrong is huge, angry, shouting matches between the founders as to who worked harder, who owns more, whose idea was it anyway, etc. That is why I would always rather split a new company 50-50 with a friend than insist on owning 60% because "it was my idea," or because "I was more experienced" or anything else. Why? Because if I split the company 60-40, the company is going to fail when we argue ourselves to death. And if you just say, "to heck with it, we can NEVER figure out what the correct split is, so let's just be pals and go 50-50," you'll stay friends and the company will survive."

Fred Wilson chimes in on his blog to say that the same holds true in the venture business. "Founding teams that allocate the founders equity fairly stay together a lot more than founding teams where one founder has a much better deal than the others. The same is true of venture capital firms. The most stable venture partnerships are those where the partners share in the carry equally or near equally. At the end of the day, this is as much about respect as it is about money. And when people feel disrespected, they are going to leave at some point."

No matter how the pie is divided, the other critical point is that the shares need to be vested for a period of years. Helping to form the initial idea over beers isn't the same as quitting your day job and putting yourself through hell to create a new business from scratch. Only those who have been along for that ride really earned an equity stake. We're looking at you, Winklevi.