Slide 11 puts the average equity for a software engineer at a 51-100 person company at 0.07%. That sounds correct-- I hesitate to use "right", here-- but that means that a person is getting about 1/20 of a proportional share. To me, that's absurd. Yes, founders and management and investors deserve their take, and 40-70% is reasonable. But not 95%.

For those who'd argue, "0.07 percent is generous for someone who just joined, hasn't done anything yet, hasn't taken any risk" let me remind them that the 0.07 is vested over 4 years (as it should be). After 4 years of loyalty and good work, she probably deserves much more than 7 pennies.

I think startup equity is toxic because it's designed to look like real business partnership, and it confuses the naive into thinking they're actual owners, but actually falls into the uncanny valley.

I think it's better to be honest about the employer/employee relationship (in the way that Wall Street is, with its generous profit sharing) than to try to hide with it bullshit. Startup equity: people paid in penny stocks that couldn't be legally sold to them and that they can't possibly evaluate because they aren't even given the social access to understand the relationships (e.g. investors) involved-- because if they had that access, they'd go off and start their own companies.

If you want to do the Cravath model and promote people to real partnership after 7 years, then do that. If you want to be like a hedge fund (which prefers generous cash bonuses over the increasing ownership complexity, and employees usually prefer that too) then do that. But the VC-istan "ownership" culture is (for engineers) a fucking lie. If we (as engineers) are going to own something, it'll be something we build ourselves and it won't happen in VC-istan.