[mauriziocalo]

> bigger pool sizes ensure potential for a breakout company

Yes, but the payout gets distributed among a larger number of companies. Increasing the pool size lowers the variance, but the expected value remains the same. Lower variance might be desirable for some people (more predictability -- at the limit it's as if you're investing 1% of your equity into an "ETF" of early-stage startups), whereas some people might prefer higher variance (higher potential upside if they join a pool with the next Stripe).

My concern is that if founders contribute 1% of their equity (not 1% of the entire company at exit), the expected value itself is quite small -- on the order of $150K under reasonably optimistic assumptions -- for something like FounderPool to make sense.

On the flipside, increasing the 1% by an order of magnitude might make more sense from a utility maximization point of view, but even less sense from an emotional standpoint.