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Comment by martinsnow | Hacker News Reader

I find your answer incredibly arrogant as a developer because you don't have a successful product so it's a gamble for anyone choosing to join your company. For me it looks like you want to skirt regulations and not pay developers for what they're worth.

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We pay very competitive on the cash side (over 200k for exceptional engineers), and have offer options that are 10x more competitive on company stake side than other companies (up to 20% for exceptional engineers, but with lower cash as a tradeoff).

I challenge anyone to find better founding engineer compensation. Comparisons from YC: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/l/software-engineer

That is indeed very good compensation. How do you evaluate who gets 20%? That's not something you can afford giving out to many.

Our founding engineering team is going to be capped at 3 or 4 max engineers, and to get 20% you need to take a pay cut. So far people have generally taken the higher cash offers. The token grants on those translate to 4-8%, which is still more than typical.

It also depends a lot on the person, I have a pretty high bar for "exceptional": https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-thing...

> I find your answer incredibly arrogant as a developer because you don't have a successful product so it's a gamble for anyone choosing to join your company.

To be fair, this is true of any equity model, which is precisely why most engineers (at least in our data set) place very little weight on equity.

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