I've been approached with an opportunity to work at a new startup. I've known the founders for several years, working with them at one point or another. They understand both the business and technology side and have had several successful exits.
This is all great, but because of this, they're self funding and not offering a lot of equity, but a pretty competitive salary (10% drop from my current mark which is on the high end in my location). My risk is essentially nil, and my upside will be nice if we're successful, but I'd like to have more skin in the game than the 2%, grant not option, they're offering at the start.
We've started doing some work and I'm making most of the technical decisions, developing our architecture plan, etc. This is my first time at the ground floor, like we don't have an office yet ground floor.
On the plus side the founders can fund us for a while, and if things go well we'd probably be able to skip several rounds of funding, leading to less dilution. But the downside is that since I'm not putting a few hundred grand into the pot I'm not a founder but merely a first employee.
With the realization that I'm taking the job, and enjoying the ride either way. Do you, HN, think that I have a shot at moving that percentage up, either through some incentives if I continue down the road of "CTO" for the company, or some other way? Or is this just part of the deal when working for something funded when the founders don't need to distribute risk?
