That is basically the 1% equity founding engineer model! You "buy in" with free labor, the delta between your compensation and market rate. Some of the problems

That is basically the 1% equity founding engineer model! You "buy in" with free labor, the delta between your compensation and market rate. Some of the problems are: * You can only "invest" in one company at a time this way, so the risk profile is much worse for you than for a VC with a lot of different portfolio companies. * It's rare for a 100-person company to be valuable enough that a 1% equity stake is competitive with the levels.fyi payscale.