This strikes me as idealist and disconnected from reality. This is how some engineers think they should be paid without ever seeing the other side. - the first year has a lot more risk than future years - often, you pay yourself less when starting out - raising money is hard - finding your first customers is hard - building from zero with no paying customers is much harder than adding features or reimplementing - quitting your job is hard

I’m not saying that maybe early employees might deserve more equity, but to suggest that contributions in year 2 of a startup are somehow equal to those of the first year is laughable to me. Maybe strictly from coding contributions, but there’s office space, culture, vision, etc. If it was that easy, that person joining would have started their own.