[thrownaway1337]

But, as "First Engineer", you get maybe 1/25th or 1/50th the equity of a founder, and you might join 3 months after the company's "founding" pre-product / pre-product market fit. The company might pivot substantially 5 times before finding fit, or might not find fit at all, or it might take 10 years to see any benefit in the 1% of cases where the company does make it.

I'm not disagreeing with your comment, but if the reason you join is to work on hard problems with passionate people then there ought to be a strong reason why it makes sense to be engineer #1 and not yourself a founder.