[ngould]

As a startup employee, I'd say a big con is not necessarily the amount of equity, but the type of equity, and difficulty of evaluating it. Common stock really only provides exposure to the tail end of good exit outcomes, since other entities on the cap table get liquidation preference, participation, and so on. To make it worse, it's not standard to share information about capitalization with employees, so we have no real shot at valuing the equity portion of an offer. It would be nice to be able to know what our equity is worth, and get some benefit from a decent but not great exit.