Fast forward to these days, the startup I worked for got acquired

It's crazy how "founder friendly" and "investor friendly" (read: "employee unfriendly") the norm has gotten. I would never work for someone else's startup these days. No way, no how. Four orders of magnitude difference between the founders' exit and the early employees' exit is totally unacceptable.

The majority of comments here seem to argue the ideal equity share for employees is zero, since it probably won't be worth anything. That seems like an even more founder friendly viewpoint, no? Mass inequality of ownership is how we end up normalizing the corrupt billionaire class. I agree with you we need an industry desire for better ownership terms, but instead I see people arguing employees should just take a salary, look the other way, and let owners hoard all the spoils.

> I believe this entire document was written to anchor new employees with lowered expectations on equity. I think this entire document is a disingenuous scam to make new startup employees think that those percentages are okay. Have to love the HN crowd. A guy goes out of his way to write a very detailed, high-quality guide demystifying a very complex and consequential topic, open sources it so it's free, and immediately people suspect the entire document is build just to make startup employees think lower percentages are OK? Disclaimer: I know the author personally, so can definitely attest to the motivation behind this guide. I'll also say I've used this guide both as a founder and as a startup employee and it's been immensely helpful.

Came to write this same comment. The first 10 employees of a company are so critical to success and they tend to be drastically underpaid. A founding engineer (often employee 3 or 4) would be lucky to get 1.5% at most places while the CTO has 30-50% and they probably have very equal impact on the company in the early days. And engineers do well by comparison. The first customer-facing roles often get barely any equity at all while they hustle to actually make an idea into a business. The VCs have convinced the founders that they are special people and they deserve 10-100x the rewards of their best employees. They do this to create room in the cap table for themselves of course. They also give the founders early liquidation opportunities to keep them on their team. It’s disgusting, and the founders wonder why some people don’t want to grind as hard as they do.

I don't think your complaint/experience actually lines up with the numbers here. In the Post-Series A numbers, the lowest numbers are in the ~0.5% range. This is at most 2 figures off what the founders could get together. In a world where founders together got 9 figures, a senior engineer would get 7 figures, not 5 figures like in your situation.

The main issue anyway is if the founders and investors own a controlling stake of the business they can just do whatever they want. Startups were definitely much better in the past but in the mid 2020s they exist on the stories of 15 years ago to try and hire talent for bargain prices