Equity and stock as part of a high-salary argument — how I documented it

My total compensation included meaningful equity, and cash salary alone understated my actual remuneration relative to the field — worth sharing how I approached documenting this for the high-salary criterion, since equity is genuinely harder to document convincingly than a simple salary figure. What I included: a formal valuation or fair-market-value documentation of the equity component at the time granted (not a speculative future value), alongside my base salary, to build an honest total-remuneration picture. I was careful to use a defensible, documented valuation method rather than an inflated or speculative number, since overreaching here would undermine credibility more than it would help. The comparison data I used also had to account for whether the field-standard compensation data I was citing included equity for comparable roles, or was cash-only — mixing an equity-inclusive figure for myself against a cash-only comparison baseline would have been a flawed comparison, so I made sure my methodology was consistent on both sides.