By asking these questions you demonstrate you are interested in the job as an investor of your effort, not as someone seeking a paycheck. By all means ask thes

By asking these questions you demonstrate you are interested in the job as an investor of your effort, not as someone seeking a paycheck. By all means ask these questions. By all means take the answers with a boatload of salt. Now, they may not answer. They may not be able to answer. But what they do say and how they approach it will tell you a lot about whether they are looking for employees to help build the company or just to do work. And if they decide not to hire you because you asked the questions, you really don't want to work there anyway.