[handy2000]

The worst example of this is the "founding engineer" role. I get a lot of these offers, and it just feels like a scam every single time. Founders often sell that as some incredible opportunity, zero-to-one, full codebase ownership, huge scope, no eng team, etc, etc. All of that for an amazing 1% equity.

So yeah, the expectation is that I will build the whole project, drive product decisions, help hiring the rest of the eng staff, spend the next 1-2 years basically working on this project 24/7. They keep 99% and I get 1%. Great, thanks.

[7e]

It's the same with YC: at the end of the day even the founders will end up owning only a small fraction of the company. The difference is that the VCs dilute you over time, not up front, to get the maximum amount of work out of you.

[twelve40]

to be fair, if they took investment, it's rarely 99%, cuz investors took a chunk, and a pool of stock gets set aside for future employees, etc. But if the there isn't even any funding yet then 1% is just stupidity.

[handy2000]

I get those too. Even if the founders gave away 10-20% to investors, actually building the project under the "management" of inexperienced founders and getting 1% doesn't seem like a fair deal. At this early stage when there is not even a product, hiring a founding engineer is a cheap way to sidestep the need for a technical co-founder who would be entitled for a much larger share of the company. The responsibilities are vast, I can't see that being worth 80-99x less than the contribution the founders make.