I have a bit of a different perspective because my equity turned out to be much more valuable than my salary, but even before that I was heavily motivated by eq

I have a bit of a different perspective because my equity turned out to be much more valuable than my salary, but even before that I was heavily motivated by equity. First of all, you are framing the discussion in the context of doing extra work over the weekend. That is entirely separate from how equity motivates a person. For example, I had a lot of equity in a company and almost never worked the weekends because I don't like working on the weekends. But having equity did change what I worked on, and in many cases this involved doing projects that were annoying but the best thing for the company (like recruiting, the most annoying thing in history). Second, equity is a lottery ticket, and it is a long term lottery ticket. You really can't think about it in a short term way. You just have to say... given my equity, if the company is worth a lot of money in 3-5 years will my equity be worth something. If you think about it on a per-hour basis, when the company is small the numbers are going to be stupid. But on the other hand, if the company becomes extremely large the numbers are going to be stupid on the other direction. What if another 0.1% of valuation increase made you an extra $50k? Should you work 24/7 because of that? Equity is really best thought about in years, and salary is best thought about in terms of hourly or weekly. Though equity and salary are paired together on your offer letter, they do really serve completely different functions. Also in practice the vast majority of the money you make from a startup is only going to come from one of them, so you should really try to calculate their values independently.