This is the kind of thing I'm going to talk about at the event. But here are some rough calculations. If you were the first person hired by a YC startup you'd

This is the kind of thing I'm going to talk about at the event. But here are some rough calculations. If you were the first person hired by a YC startup you'd probably get between 3% and 30% of the company. I know that's a wide range, but that's the range I've seen. Suppose to make the math easy you got 10%. Suppose you get diluted 20% by funding rounds before a $10m exit. That yields $800k. In a $100m exit you'd probably have been diluted more, because the company would probably have taken VC funding to get that much. So suppose your 10% was diluted by 2/3. Then you'd get $3.3 million. This is assuming you're the first person hired by the startup, of course. The amount of equity you get decreases by time to a power. Someone who joins the company after 6 months would get way less than half as much as someone who joins after 3 months. It's rare for a series A funded startup to give more than 1% to a programmer.