"If you are going to make equity part of the package, cut out slices that will make people actually care. This means 3-5% for employee #10 and 0.5-1% for employ

"If you are going to make equity part of the package, cut out slices that will make people actually care. This means 3-5% for employee #10 and 0.5-1% for employee #50... the actual numbers seem to be closer to 0.3% and 0.04%, which are in the "who gives a fuck" range." If my anecdotal skimming of AngelList job postings is any indication, even those numbers are, sadly, pretty high in today's market. It's not uncommon to see something like 0.25% being offered to lead engineers in the first batch of 10. I've also seen things like 0.025% for an Employee #25. Numbers like these are, quite frankly, insulting to anyone who knows better. For some reason, maybe a lot of people still don't know any better? It definitely strikes me as a weird sign of the times that companies can get away with stingier and stingier equity offers. The founders of these sorts of companies are basically taking on massive amounts of risk, then selling that risk down the foodchain to their employees. I'm not sure what explains this behavior, since I'd always assumed that today's young engineers, in the era of the VC blogger and the founder/author, were better informed about the way things really work. There are, of course, plenty of startups that don't play these sorts of games. Life's too short to work for a startup that does.