

Ask HN: How much equity to give early folks - jtoeman

Here&#x27;s the scenario: a company&#x27;s been around and idle for a while, yet growing organically with no product development&#x2F;new features&#x2F;marketing&#x2F;etc. Now its at the point where the founders are ready to put a team in place, build out the features&#x2F;etc.  Characteristics:<p>* 100&#x27;s of thousands of users; many of which are active
* High sticky factor
* Past &quot;MVP&quot; &#x2F; product-market-fit status
* Huge potential market opp (let&#x27;s call it a Dropbox-sized opportunity, though in a different feature&#x2F;product category)<p>The founders still own the entire company. How much should they expect to give up for first engineer, first designer, etc in the context that they will likely skip a Seed round, and possibly never fundraise at all.  In other words: strong potential of little-to-no dilution.<p>Any thoughts would be great!
======
sharemywin
Here's the problem stock is worthless unless you go public or sell the
company. It's also double hard to value stock that this point because you have
no investors to kind of back up your vision. I would just offer them a fair
salary w/good benefits. If the candidate your like says no them negotiate with
them, they might bite with stock you never know. I would make is vest over 5
years though.

~~~
jtoeman
thanks - agreed with your philosophy in general.

in this particular situation, the employees _want_ the company's stock - the
team is just trying to figure out what's fair...

