Sure, but that's why I said compare to other opportunities and repeat. But you are right, I should have said "a better way". EV works ok at the beginning to s

Sure, but that's why I said compare to other opportunities and repeat. But you are right, I should have said "a better way". EV works ok at the beginning to sanity check, because you have very little info, and honestly unlikey enough to do a utility comparison on two similar offers. EU is really hard to even estimate here. If you truly value equity at $0, why accept it at all? Fwiw I've seen this experiment done with founding engineers, offer a sliding scale of salary and equity, in bounded ranges. 100% of people in that case (small sample) took some equity in exchange for a bit lower salary. Obviously they didn't actually value it at $0.