| No. So many reasons. * Even people with long-term commitments to companies have a hard time valuing equity. * In order to value equity, you need to be given access to confidential details of the company. * It's legally expensive to give different kinds of equity to people, and every time you do it you create a small (or worse) amount of risk. * The rules about employee equity are well-tested and understood. The rules about equity offered like this aren't. * Offers for exchange of equity for in-kind services could be construed as unlawful solicitation of investment (I don't know, and am not a lawyer). * Having a web design contractor on your cap table is going to make it harder to close VC rounds. * Screwing up your equity grant to a web design contractor so that they have an effective veto on a VC round is going to make it impossible to close VC rounds. * Employee equity vests. * At good companies, a grant of equity has uncapped upside. Nobody buys web design for "potentially unlimited dollars". * So now you also have adverse selection to deal with: the companies whose equity is available in a program like this won't be the Airbnbs and Dropboxes of the world. * Similar barter programs (based on pure in-kind/in-kind exchanges) have been tried for decades (the ISP I worked at in the '90s was involved in one) and they appear to reliably fail; once people start to believe their contributions aren't fairly valued, a vicious cycle sets in. I wouldn't just not participate in a program like this; I wouldn't work for a company I found to be participating in one. |
Many (I'd even say most, maybe?) venture-backed startups engage in something like this, though, just not for very concrete things like design or engineering or marketing. Members of 'Advisory Boards' or 'Technical Advisors' or similar often get some nominal amount of stock [options/RSUs/whatnot]. Maybe this just flies under the radar with the expected value by both participants in the transaction being close to nil.