THIS the test of... if they truly thought it was a billion dollar idea, surely it would be smarter of them to retain all that equity for themselves, not a sing

THIS the test of... if they truly thought it was a billion dollar idea, surely it would be smarter of them to retain all that equity for themselves, not a single drop for the developer. but gee, perhaps there's a chance, just a chance, it won't be worth a billion dollars, and perhaps... nothing. So in that scenario, the brave entrepreneur wants to minimize his cash spend down the hole. but where there's a chance of great reward there's a chance of loss (whether of dollars or time.) Also a certain percentage of entrepreneur types seem to correlate with the psychopath/sociopath type. And it's hard to identify those folks early on sometimes. And it's early on in your relationship with them where there's the most pressure to take on an equity relationship. Which gets back to a "dating before marriage" and "work for cash, only" and "observed actual performance and iterative reciprocity" policy as being the safer, more conservative best practice. For all parties, I suspect.