What a lot of people fail to understand is that successful startups derisk in exponential steps. It may seem unfair to a lot of people that early employees are

What a lot of people fail to understand is that successful startups derisk in exponential steps. It may seem unfair to a lot of people that early employees are paid 2 or 3 orders of magnitude of equity less than founders for doing perhaps even more work. What they fail to understand is that they're not being paid equity for work, they're being paid for risk. Successful startup founders are obsessed with derisking at every step along the way and even when it seems like "they haven't done very much", the stuff they are doing is relentlessly pushing a startup through the various gates in which a certain percentage fail at every gate. So it wouldn't surprise me if a reasonable equity split for Gimlet ended up around the 90/10 range. Considering that Alex managed to raise $1.5M almost entirely based on the back of his reputation, he's really offering ~$700K of equity to his co-founder vesting over 4 years. There's no way his other co-founder could have found an opportunity that big through any other avenue so it would have been smart for him to take the 10%.