[byoung2]

Obviously I don't have the specifics about you or this particular startup, but I can speak in general. A startup this early in the game has a 99% of being out of business in a few years, so you have to consider that. Let's take two scenarios...high salary and minimal options, say $150k and 500 options at $1 or you could go for high options and low salary, say 2000 options at $1 and $75k. Let's assume that if the company is not out of business in 4 years that it exits at a valuation 100x the current valuation. In that case, 500 options would be worth $50k, and 2000 options would be worth $200k. The guy who took the $150k salary would have made $600k in salary over 4 years, and would have a 1% chance that the options would be worth $50k. So the best case is $650k, worst case is $600k. The guy who took the options would have made $300k in salary, and a 1% chance of the options being worth $200k. The best case is $500k, but there is a 99% chance that he would get the worst case and just have the $300k of salary. In most cases it is better to just take the salary and a token amount of options. That said, there is the possibility that if the company is in the 1% that actually survives 4 years, that there is an even more remote possibility that they may go on to be a unicorn type company and make secretaries rich from options. In that case, even a token amount of options should make you fabulously wealthy.