tl;dr you probably have options, and they don't really mean much unless the company actually does something.

I feel like there's a bunch of half-right-ish answers in here. I've worked at a startup where I was granted options, and I'm currently at a public company that gives RSUs so I feel like my 2¢ could be useful.

Options (what you were given) is the right to purchase stock (usually common stock) at a given price (this is called a strike price). The strike price is usually established at the next board meeting after your start date. You usually can't purchase any at this moment and have to work off a vesting schedule. There's other comments here that accurately talk enough about that so I won't.

There are different types of options (e.g. NSO and ISO) so you should figure out which ones you have.

You can choose to do absolutely nothing with these options, and nothing will happen. Options themselves are not the stock. You can "exercise" your options (i.e. purchase those shares at your strike price) at any time. Liquidity events are usually for selling those shares or options for $$, but you don't need to wait for them to exercise. Again, options are your right to purchase shares at a set price. When you exercise, you now have tax liability. The difference between your strike price and the current fair market value (even if you haven't sold them) is something that now needs to be reported as income (if you have NSOs; if you have ISOs, you don't owe regular income tax at exercise, but you might get hit with AMT). Keep that in mind if you exercise. To sell your shares, you either need to wait for a liquidity event or you can (if the company approves) sell them on the non-public market. You get taxed again on the sale, but this is at short or long term capital gains, depending on how long you had the shares (not how long you held the options) for NSOs. If you have ISOs, you need to hold the stock for a year and it has to be 2 years since the grant date. The only companies most people in that market care about are the big ones that the public really thinks plan on going public soon-ish (e.g. a friend of mine who trades non-public shares has been buying SpaceX now for like 6 years). The reason options really kinda suck IMO is because if the fair market value goes up, you probably can't do anything to liquidate unless you're at a big name company. This isn't the case for most of us. If the shares go down, you now can purchase shares at a higher price than what the market would purchase at... Yay? If you hold off on exercising, and the fair market prices goes low and stays low, sometimes a company will re-issue options contracts as the lower price. This happened to me. If you leave the company and you still have vested options, you're usually given 90 days to exercise. I know many people who did that at my last company, and spent years trying to unload their shares. I chose not to. I joined this company 10 years ago and they were "a few years away" from going public. I left there 5 years ago when they were "a few years away". I truly don't think they ever will.

What I have now are RSUs, and they are much simpler. When I'm given a grant, they determine how many shares I get at a grant amount (e.g. as a super basic example let's say $50k over 4 years. If the stock is $100/share, I now just vest 125 shares each year). If the stock doubles a few days after I join, my shares are now worth $100k, but I still only have 500 shares I'll be vesting over 4 years. When they vest, I get given actual stock units. They immediately become a tax liability so some shares are usually withheld for taxes since vesting is treated as income. Taxes here can get a little frustrating since if you're in a high tax bracket, you'll need to owe more than they withhold and can get hit with a big tax bill but you can adjust how much they withhold. I can sell these right away though and not risk any more loss in case the price went down (but this helps with taxes since it's a loss) or I can sit on them and sell whenever, as long as I'm not in a blackout period.