[dman]

Yes this is one of the main reasons why I am not working for a startup currently even after running my own startup for 2 years and having loved the experience. Over the course of interviewing with multiple startups and getting offers the amount of equity being offered was so little that the companies would have to hit ~250 Million valuations for the options to be worth in the mid 5 digits. From my perpective the risk-reward ratio for the first 10 engineers is much much worse than that for the founders. I do intend to go back to founding something again in a couple of years.

[harryh]

mid 5 digits is 50k? 50k / 250M = 0.02%

That's perhaps ~10x less than is typical.

I'm not saying your general intentions are wrong, but you should be able to get a much better deal from startups than you have seen to date if you want. I'm moderately surprised at your experience.

[dman]

I cant name and shame the companies but I was surprised about the offers. EDIT: fwiw - for the purposes of the original post I am not including offers that I got where I was offered a higher stake but where I did not have a high conviction about the startup.

[Timothee]

That might be true but I find 0.2%, thus $500k for a $250M valuation, still very low.

$250M valuations are quite an achievement already and $500k, while it will pay off a mortgage, is not life-changing. (not talking out of experience here :)) So, an early engineer who will most likely be very instrumental to bringing the company to such a valuation ends up with a(n admittedly very) nice bonus, while founders do end up with life-changing wealth.

[harryh]

Ya, I was just saying that is sounds like dman wasn't even getting "standard" offers. I wasn't really weighing in on whether the "standard" offer makes sense or not. It's a challenging question.

[danssig]

Typical to what? What is offered? I'm not sure why we're even still talking about what is offered since it should be clear by now that early employees won't be getting that anyway.