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> Joined 4yo as a junior full stack. £40k comp, 0.2% equity. Offered role as good friends with founders. 1st employee. I understand this was junior, and friends maybe helping someone learn on the job to switch careers, and probably a good and fair deal. But since this is HN, I want to note that 0.2% equity for a first hire experienced full-stack person would be a terrible deal for the employee. (I'm calling this out on HN, because I often see founders who think they deserve 70%+ equity, while simultaneously thinking that even a key first hire, who to a large extent could make or break the company, and brings skills founders don't have, deserves only 1%-2%, and only in options they'll probably never be able to liquidate. Just yesterday, I walked away from a recruiter pitching a seed-stage first-hire opportunity. The apparently not-very-technical founder needed a laundry list of technical skills, all over full-stack and iOS and ops, at very experienced hands-on level (they asked for no big company small cogs), as the first hire, to un-fudge the MVP they previously tried to contract-out... for below-market salary, and 0.5% equity. I told the recruiter it's ridiculous for the founder to think they deserve two orders of magnitude more equity than this mythical unicorn first hire. Then I had to clarify that I wasn't negotiating, but that (combined with other concerning signs I was previously open to discussing) this looked like definitely a stereotypical bad startup, of a kind that I wouldn't be allowed to fix. Experienced people should just say no to founders who think the company is their creation and their property, and that first/early hires are only commodity gig workers. I hope post-ZIRP VC will destroy most of the people who got away with this kind of thinking, such as with the Potemkin Village investment scam startups. And that we'll eventually heal all the follow-on negative cultural effects this had on the field.) |
Thanks for calling it out - we all need more educating on this