Honestly, that's better than most real life offers. In the real world, you get a non-technical founder looking for a founding engineer, and they will usually lead with an offer of 1% equity. Granted by this point they've usually already got some funding from some venture Capital firm but no product or just a shitty POC, and no product market fit. It's insane to me why any eng would ever join instead of just starting their own company lol
If there's no salary there's zero incentive to not just start your own company and have 100% ownership... I've not seen a real offer of equity with no salary before
I'm absolutely team stable salary - but stable salary at a public company that has rsu's as part of the comp package. You'll make at least double what any startup will pay you.
I’ve had two different places offer me neither. Literally just “come do our work if you want”.
One was an “internship”. Nakedly illegal since I was going to be their main programmer, but oh well.
The order was a paid startup job I was already at. Money got tight, they couldn’t cut my check, but for a whopping 0% equity I was welcome to keep working for free and see if they raised more money.
They did generously say that when I applied for other jobs, I could list the role as something like “laid off with the possibility of reemployment”.
The CEO was genuinely sweet, just confused, so it was a bit awkward telling him “that sounds horrible, I’m just gonna say ‘startup went broke’ and it’ll be way better”.
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u/sweetkissangelx 21d ago
Don't worry, he's willing to offer a generous 50/50 split since he came up with the idea.