> I offered to stay on full-time for half-pay and half-equity. There's a lot of red flags here ... some random advice: 1) Ensure your deal is in writing. 2)

> I offered to stay on full-time for half-pay and half-equity. There's a lot of red flags here ... some random advice: 1) Ensure your deal is in writing. 2) To protect your equity, you need to be in the room when new investments are negotiated. Otherwise you will be diluted or new options pools created without you even knowing. 3) Business people think very little of programmers in general, until they need to hire one. To them, you're a secretary with an attitude. 4) a product launch costs about $1 million. If they have money for that, then they can also pay your salary 5) It's irrelevant to you whether the CEO is taking a salary or not. Unless you have access to the books, how do you even know? It seems that generally CEOs land on their feet. 6) The shares you think they gave you "clutter up the cap table" and make it more difficult to get investors later. Typically VCs try to wipe out the angel investors (who have lawyers.) Guess what they'll do to a programmer.