[wellthat]

Suppose someone (highly qualified, not from the startup world however) can tweak your marketing message for a couple of weeks (i.e. work on your startup for 80-150 hours intensively) and as a direct consquence get you an audience of millions, because your message is now awesome. This person doensn't care about startups.

Say you are pre-money. How should you pay for this person's time?

You would think, if this person can really work for two weeks and give you a company that is worth seeding at a high valuation (due to traction), which also becomes a good signal and thereafter with the company's fantastic traction, money, and engaged audience, it has fantastic growth prospects - but without these two weeks will simply languish as another "project" - then a two percent stake with no cliff whatsoever is a no-brainer.

[ghaff]

And, if you're a consultant, with few exceptions, taking an equity stake rather than cash is not a good idea. Happened a lot in the dot com bubble. Not pretty. Sure, if you're looking for work and a genuinely intriguing opportunity that only takes a couple weeks comes along, why not? But bad idea as a business model.