The problem is that the relationship between your outcome as a holder of ISOs and the outcome for the company as a whole is pretty opaque. You have no idea what

The problem is that the relationship between your outcome as a holder of ISOs and the outcome for the company as a whole is pretty opaque. You have no idea what the companies cap table looks like, what sort of liquidity preference the VCs have and what are the various ways in which you can be diluted. If you want to offer people ISOs as a bonus/inventive (i.e. pay a market salary and throw in options as an extra) then great. But if you are asking people to trade off salary for a financial instrument that can't possibly be valued with the information available to then it is kind of shitty to be upset when someone gives them an implicit value of 0.