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Comment by acconrad | Hacker News Reader

> If the founders don’t take 50% raises, neither should the super early employee with decent equity.

You're missing the point of my original post. If a founder owns x100 the equity, why should an early employee be bound to the same salary restrictions?

If anything, since I have 1/100th the equity, that means I should be able to get a multiple of some raise when series A comes through.

Remember, equity is a lottery ticket (especially for an employee). If you're a founder, even if your startup fails, you can get a job as a highly-paid EIR or your founder reputation will allow you to join some other startup in a high level role (VP, Director, etc). This does not apply for engineer/employee #1.

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If founder has x100 the equity of employee #1, employee #1 screwed up.

Welcome to this entire conversation on why early employee compensation isn't fair.

My point is Employee #1 should’ve asked for more. 1% isn’t enough. Maybe 5 or 10% is.

Yes, let's blame the person that structurally has less power in the dynamic for having that power imbalance used against them.

Of course you can try to negotiate for more. Enough people want to work at a startup however that if you ask too much, you'll get passed on, and they'll just hire the next candidate who doesn't act so entitled to a meaningful piece of the founders' pie. It's exactly the same phenomenon that lets the big game studios chew up and spit out engineers: there's always someone else willing to take the job for less, or even just put up with the status quo.

That's a massive part of the problem, and telling people to negotiate better doesn't address it — or even acknowledge it.

Let them take the worse candidate then. The startup is probably going to fail anyway. Jobs are easier to find than good engineers, especially your first few engineers. That requires taking a leap.

Well, but then don't look for generic cookie cutter startups that everyone wants to work at :) Go after the startup where you as employee #1 are uniquely positioned to negotiate for. If you're employee #1 and you just graduated from college and this is your first job, and you have no special abilities beyond every other CS graduate across the United States, then yeah, you really don't have much negotiating power... nor do you at any other large company like Google either.

I’m not too sure why you’re being downvoted, but it is probably because you phrased your statement a bit awkwardly.

But you’re right that (if there is only a very small number of co-founders) employee #1 should never be accepting 1/100 the total equity the founders have. Employee #1 screwed up in negotiating at least half way decent deal for themselves.

I was a bit blunt.

However, it is up to potential employees to refuse offers that are not in their best interest.

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