If you join a startup immediately following a Series A and you only get 0.01%, you almost certainly got screwed. We were fairly stingy with equity, and an engin

If you join a startup immediately following a Series A and you only get 0.01%, you almost certainly got screwed. We were fairly stingy with equity, and an engineer joining then would have gotten around 0.5%, 50x what you're basing your math on. And over a 4 year vesting period, not a 6 year one. $2mm ($40k x 50) for your 4 years of work is substantially less bad. And employees who stayed with us tended to get new equity grants over time as well. So yeah, don't take a startup job for tiny amounts of equity. You should get significant equity for joining that early with that much risk.