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Cap table isn't the same thing as salary. It's the (future, in case of options) ownership of the company. Cap table transparency would go a long way in making

Cap table isn't the same thing as salary. It's the (future, in case of options) ownership of the company. Cap table transparency would go a long way in making VC-istan honest because the equities in salary tend to be small while those in equity are massive. If engineers in a typical VC-istan startup found out that the non-tech VPs and "product people" working 10-to-4 were making $140k while they make $110k, nothing would happen. That's not enough of a difference to set most people off. If they found out that those people had 1% while they had 0.05%, it'd be epic. (That's why VC-istan hides cap tables. It doesn't want to have to admit that engineers are commodities to it.)

tptacek 13y ago
You don't need cap tables to know that the employee equity is small compared to investor equity. It obviously is. Most everyone I talk to knows that. VCs aren't "hiding" it. If you don't want to work at a company where a pencil-pushing meeting-dwelling financier is going to earn an outsized reward compared to your efforts as a software developer, don't work for VC-funded startups. On the other hand, VC-funded startups tend to work on fun speculative problems, because they're powered by other people's money. What a "non-tech VP" makes has nothing to do with an engineer's outcome. Obsessing about what other people in the company make is unhealthy.