A $500,000 raise pre-prototype is not a Series A. It's a seed round in a market in which lots of seed rounds (perhaps the majority) are being raised by companie

A $500,000 raise pre-prototype is not a Series A. It's a seed round in a market in which lots of seed rounds (perhaps the majority) are being raised by companies that already have a prototype or launched product. That means this company is going to be playing catch up. Instead of using $500,000 to improve an existing prototype or product, or scale a nascent business, the founders here need to use the $500,000 to build a product from scratch and get it to market successfully. If they don't, it is unlikely they will be able to raise a Series A because while the bar for raising seed funding is incredibly low today, the bar for raising a Series A is fairly high and only getting higher. If you're intent on being this company's first engineering hire, responsible for building the first version of the company's product, you should consider that you are largely going to be responsible for getting the company to the point where it can raise a Series A, which is going to be a low seven-figure amount at a minimum. In other words, if you deliver, you are going to put these founders in the best position possible to raise millions of dollars at a valuation meaningfully higher than the current valuation. From this perspective, you might want to consider that $140,000 and 2% of the company is not too much but rather too little.