> Taking a salary implies you're forgoing a salary You lost me there. How does taking a salary imply that you’re foregoing a salary? That sentence doesn’t make

> Taking a salary implies you're forgoing a salary You lost me there. How does taking a salary imply that you’re foregoing a salary? That sentence doesn’t make sense. You seem to be conflating the expected value of equity with the general financial outcome of having a job, or you might not know precisely what expected value means. (That’s okay! I’m not judging.) You can’t say that equity is positive EV just because you didn’t lose money and ended up with some salary. To calculate EV, you must compare it to what happens when you don’t take equity. That is the definition of Expected Value: the probability of an event multiplied by the outcome gain/loss. Since accepting lower salary has a probability of 100%, and the probability of the value of shares being greater than $0 has a probability less than 100%, it is obvious and tautological that the EV of some equity can be negative. If I take a half salary, and a bunch of equity to compensate for the low salary, and the company never goes public, then it’s a negative outcome, I lose 50% of the money compared to taking a full salary with no equity. (Even if I collected, say, $1M in salary in the mean time.) This is what actually happens all the time, equity ends up worth less than the value that it was traded for. Given that most startups fail and never go public, that means that the average EV of equity over all startups probably is negative.