[Hermitian909]

> When you’ve raised a $20M round and have an employee pool that is 10-20% in total, you don’t have many 1% grants to give…and you have exactly zero 6% grants to give.

This is true, but the percentages illustrate how silly many investors are being about the resources necessary to put together a good engineering team.

I've had offers from startups with well known VC backers who wanted me specifically. They'd tell me their upper bound on cash, and then assuming I thought they had a decent chance, I'd calculate how much stock I'd need to make for the expected value for working for them to be at least as good as at a big tech company. Generally the calculation came out to 4-6% of the company per year.

That number could be lowered if I had access to the cap table or were being issued some kind of preferred stock, but no one's willing to do those things either.

Cash is cheap and labor is expensive but investors still want a way better deal than any engineer could dream of.