This sounds fishy. I'm a CTO in Europe (UK) at at firm with a similar valuation. When I signed up not only did I get options at the outset, but I _bought_ in on

This sounds fishy. I'm a CTO in Europe (UK) at at firm with a similar valuation. When I signed up not only did I get options at the outset, but I _bought_ in on the pre-seed round with the founders very happy for me to do so. As others have said, you should not be writing code all day long (I tend to dip into coding about 10-15% of my time). Instead you should be setting direction, managing and leading people, and drive delivery of product increments.