Oh, and offer me as much salary as you can with the option for me to dial that back into equity. I can't pay a mortgage or buy pizza with options, and my market rate does not fluctuate based on how much buzz you have on twitter.
The founders' got Pauli as an engineer, any problems, he goes to Pauli, problems with EC2, he can go to pauli, troubles with rails, hard drives, Linux, he can go to Pauli, but now he's gotta come up with Pauli's money every week, no matter what.
Your tweet didn't go viral? Sorry to hear about that, fuck you pay me.
Your funding didn't come through? Fuck you, pay me.
People don't need more coupons? Fuck you, pay me.
Servers crashed in the middle of the night? Fuck you, pay me.
And then finally when there's nothing left and he can't raise another dime from the VC, or clear anymore paper on second market, you bust the joint out, take the code and release it as open source.
If founders actually believed their option bullshit it would be a no brainer to keep those valuable options and pay engineers 200K. There is no shortage of engineers, only a shortage of suckers.