They're looking for "employee number zero". First person involved who isn't a founder (isn't in the room when the idea is created), but takes on founder level risk and should expect greater than usual equity and compensation somewhere between that of a founder and an employee.
Something screams poor execution: confused goals (they're talking about "getting real" - a 37 signals type philosophy of building a sustainable small business - but are acting like they're built with the intention of an exit, expecting people to work for equity), getting an office before they can truly afford, lack of the right connections to find the person I've mentioned the first paragraph (without resorting to the Internet equiv of newspaper's classifieds page)
They're also doing enterprise software/SaaS - yet it's not clear that their "biz-dev" guys have any "sales engineering" experience (that's what makes or breaks an enterprise product). Along this angle, what's even more ironic is that they're asking the prospective employees to sell themselves short! What's the guarantee that such an employee won't do the same to their software/service (and yes, an early stage engineer will be involved in the sales/support process)?
Something screams poor execution: confused goals (they're talking about "getting real" - a 37 signals type philosophy of building a sustainable small business - but are acting like they're built with the intention of an exit, expecting people to work for equity), getting an office before they can truly afford, lack of the right connections to find the person I've mentioned the first paragraph (without resorting to the Internet equiv of newspaper's classifieds page)
They're also doing enterprise software/SaaS - yet it's not clear that their "biz-dev" guys have any "sales engineering" experience (that's what makes or breaks an enterprise product). Along this angle, what's even more ironic is that they're asking the prospective employees to sell themselves short! What's the guarantee that such an employee won't do the same to their software/service (and yes, an early stage engineer will be involved in the sales/support process)?