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Agreed, I don't know why anyone would come in as employee number 1 at a startup. You take a large portion of the risk with almost no upside. At least if your en
by kanwisher 11y ago
Agreed, I don't know why anyone would come in as employee number 1 at a startup. You take a large portion of the risk with almost no upside. At least if your engineer number 20 your getting full salary and benefits and you have no delusions about your stock option value. I think Joel's post is not correct. Most people have to just discount all options to zero value
- sbov 11y agoBefore coming to this site I never realized how shafted employee number 1 gets at most startups. I've worked with the same CTO as employee #1 at various startups for the last ~10 years. I generally get around 5%. The idea that people would take 1% or less sounds crazy to me. It's just not worth the hours and stress it involves that early on. In return I earn about 33-50% less salary than what I probably could elsewhere. So far it's paid off for me. But if I got less than 1% instead I would be worse off for it.
- mbesto 11y agoSimple. Look at early Google and PayPal employees (Marissa Mayer, Dave McClure, Keith Rabois, Reid Hoffman, etc). They are kings in the valley right now. It's an irrational aspiration, but if you happen to lock in early at "the next big thing", the opportunity doors swing wide open.
- kzhahou 11y agoSergey and Larry had 30 BILLION dollars in stock on the day of IPO. Google made a lot of multi-millionaires, but the wild discrepancy between founder and non-founder equity was present there as well.