This, definitely. Whether or not they'll give you a simple percentage number for your stock is a good indicator of whether you can trust them or they're trying to pull the wool over your eyes. There are probably many others. At the end of the day, if you don't get straightforward answers to straightforward questions, then you probably can't trust them.
Caveat: some questions that sound (in the light of inexperience) like they are straightforward are not to people with more experience of the issue in question. For example, a naive computer purchaser might ask "can this laptop run my Excel spreadsheets?". A naive salesperson might clinch the sale with a simple "yes". An experienced salesperson who'd had to process many returns after such sales might say "well, it depends on how large your spreadsheets are". But the naive buyer might think that the experienced salesperson was being non-straightforward and look for a different, less accurate salesperson who seemed more trustworthy because his answers were simpler.
Luckily, percentage ownership is pretty easy to be straightforward about. Except... I've met quite a lot of developers who, after I've explained their options grants to them, were surprised and unhappy to discover that if they get options over (say) 1% of the company, they won't always have options over 1% of the company. They didn't understand that when a company takes on new investment, existing investors (including options holders) get diluted. They thought that their 1% was 1% forever.
Which means that if a developer asked me "what percentage of the company will my options amount to" I might respond "x% of the current fully-diluted shares. But remember that that could go down in percentage terms if we took on further investment." And a naive developer might think that the caveat in that sentence meant that I was being less-than-sincere (rather than being as honest as I know how) and move on.
Caveat: some questions that sound (in the light of inexperience) like they are straightforward are not to people with more experience of the issue in question. For example, a naive computer purchaser might ask "can this laptop run my Excel spreadsheets?". A naive salesperson might clinch the sale with a simple "yes". An experienced salesperson who'd had to process many returns after such sales might say "well, it depends on how large your spreadsheets are". But the naive buyer might think that the experienced salesperson was being non-straightforward and look for a different, less accurate salesperson who seemed more trustworthy because his answers were simpler.
Luckily, percentage ownership is pretty easy to be straightforward about. Except... I've met quite a lot of developers who, after I've explained their options grants to them, were surprised and unhappy to discover that if they get options over (say) 1% of the company, they won't always have options over 1% of the company. They didn't understand that when a company takes on new investment, existing investors (including options holders) get diluted. They thought that their 1% was 1% forever.
Which means that if a developer asked me "what percentage of the company will my options amount to" I might respond "x% of the current fully-diluted shares. But remember that that could go down in percentage terms if we took on further investment." And a naive developer might think that the caveat in that sentence meant that I was being less-than-sincere (rather than being as honest as I know how) and move on.
So it's complicated.