[kzhahou]

> Houston is also working hard to ensure that Dropbox feels like a collection of peers, at all levels of the company

But that surely doesn't extend to equity, where the founder holds an order of magnitude or two more than his VP of Engineering, who holds an order of magnitude more than his rank-and-file employee "peers" who built and continue to build the company towards success.

[vonklaus]

That's how most companies work. The risk diminishes as the company becomes more established and recruiting becomes easier. Houston wrote the prototype himself and became accepted to Y-Combinator on that platform. Before attending he met Ferdowsi and they went through Y-Combinator and iterated on the design and built a great product, they made the viral Digg video and released to a waitlist of +75,000. Before another employee was hired YC was in the cap table and 7 participants had funded in the seed stage (included sequoia).

I am not sure if the group dynamic functions as peers, in that decisions and features and such are developed by discussion and there is mutual respect. However, I think Houston and Ferdowsi are more responsible for DB success than others and thus have a bigger slice of the Cap table.

[kzhahou]

It's typical for the founder to hold 2-5 times as much equity as all employees combined. We can argue risk all day long. I claim this is a severe imbalance, and one day silicon valley workers will wake up to it and demand more for their services.