TL;DR: Given four founders total, 25% equity seems like a reasonable starting point for your negotiations, but I don’t recommend sacrificing salary for it. Aft

TL;DR: Given four founders total, 25% equity seems like a reasonable starting point for your negotiations, but I don’t recommend sacrificing salary for it. After working for startups as a founder, employee, or consultant for 12+ years, I've learned to treat equity as a bonus and not as a substitute for salary—because no matter how much you trust the founders, any subsequent investors will, by definition, dilute existing shareholders. Those 12 years included a half dozen startups, only half of which I had equity in. In every case that equity ended up amounting to nothing, either because the business ultimately failed or an acquisition diluted my shares to zero. (In the latter case, I got generous retention bonuses, but that was a function of salary, not equity.) I was fine with the equity outcome only because I demanded, and got, market rates every time. Not only do the vast majority of startups fail; the chances of a successful exit are slimmer still. A lottery ticket is no substitute for salary. First-time founders tend to overvalue equity; use that to your advantage.