[TheOtherHobbes]

As an employee you're limited by the quality of the C-suite.

If you swap equity for salary, it's important to understand that you're not gambling on the quality of the product or the idea, but on the quality and integrity of the people you're working for.

You probably won't have enough information to make a good decision about their quality and integrity until you've been working somewhere for a while.

But generally, if one promise doesn't work out, you have good reason to suspect others won't too.

Equity is really just a promise. So you should have a lot of evidence of reliability and integrity before you count on it.

[rday]

I think you're quite right. I tend to feel that people want to do good, and make judgments based off that.

Since my early mistakes, I've started telling myself "You're not negotiating with the person across the table, you're negotiating with unknown parties and circumstances in the future".

That kind of removes the human element.