> Assuming two founders and a 7% stake by YC, the founders retain 48.5% equity. I think its usually more accurate to state that the company retains some N% of

> Assuming two founders and a 7% stake by YC, the founders retain 48.5% equity. I think its usually more accurate to state that the company retains some N% of equity, while the founders are granted some further amount M% where M<N. Every company is different, but at least in VC backed companies, you're going to keep dry powder on the cap table to hire employees and prepare for future capital raises. Though, for a very early liquidation event, things are different. The far more common estimate of M that I've seen at liquidation, after enough time and capital injections to get to a $10M+ sale, is like 10-15%. Its pretty rare to see a founder exit at $10M+ valuation with 45%+ of the company still under their control (but, it does happen, for sure). My biased take is that founding engineers uniquely make ultra-high leverage technical decisions that have the power to save or cost the company millions of dollars, not just in cloud costs but much more importantly in engineer salaries and lost revenue due to an inability to deliver on product priorities. There is no other "founding" role beside the founders themselves which can claim this. Oftentimes, if you come to the "right" side of one of these high-leverage technical decisions a year later, its too late, and the cost-benefit of implementation might fall in disfavor of the expected return. So, yeah: I am definitely in favor of the idea that 2% is the bare minimum a founding engineer should accept, and something more like 5% is far more fair. I've joined startups as Engineer #6 before, and received something like 0.4%; to suggest that a founding engineer should get as low as 1% is an insult to the positive leverage they can assert on the organization at that stage.