Salary and equity have nothing to do with what you "deserve", only what you're able to negotiate.

For early/mid stage startups - this is an awful position to take. These orgs are heavily influenced by who they hire - what you pay defines your incentive structure.

Does the world class engineer or business development lead just take it easy and travel around after they join?

Does the new manager push the team and business forward or prioritize stability?

Do engineers spend their time on reactors and impressive sounding projects or figuring out what customers need?

Do people feel lucky to have a seat in the org or do they spend their time complaining and looking for the exits?

Money isn't the only lever, but its a strong one - startups will never compete with established firms on cash outlays.

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shortrounddev2 3 days ago | parent [-]

People are paid salary and awarded equity based on supply/demand for labor, the marginal product of that labor, and the amount of risk engineers are willing to accept by joining a startup. It's an economic transaction, the same as buying office equipment and signing contracts for cloud resources. Trying to imbue mysticism into it is just asking to be lied to by your employees

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lumost 3 days ago | parent [-]

There is no mysticism in incentive structures. My point was rather that if you provide strictly below market compensation (as most startup equity is positioned these days). You are likely to get below average talent, or below average results from poor incentives.

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shortrounddev2 3 days ago | parent [-]

Im not saying that you should pay below market rates, im just saying that the equity calculation is just about supply and demand. It has nothing to do with fairness

	▲	lumost 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's not so much a question about fairness, just that the employee and employer are playing different games. Acknowledging this and devising a compensation strategy which aligns incentives is important. Employers play an iterated game where they will hire/release/develop many workers, Employees play a single game where they choose the firm that maximizes their compensation offer. Once the employee joins, the incentives flip - employers can take advantage of the fact that employees can't move in less than a year to maximize output, while employees can take advantage of their influence on the organization to minimize expectations. Hence employers offer strong bonuses, or pay above market to avoid this behavior. Supply/Demand influences what companies pay - but isn't the only influence. Thinking that you can stiff your employees on equity compensation and have it go unnoticed is imaginary. Employees convinced of outsized valuations for equity compensation will quickly become disillusioned.

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maerF0x0 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Would love to engage in a discussion with you on this. How would you describe "deserve" in the sense of compensation? I agree with your premise that what you get is ultimately bound by the ceiling of the payer's generosity and your ability to negotiate.

But what sorts of things input into the function of "deserve"?

	▲	shortrounddev2 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Everyone deserves healthcare, a place to live, food to eat. Some people deserve to live happy lives and some people deserve to rot in prison. These are about your personal conduct and how much you contribute to society. How much equity or salary you get in a company is a function of supply/demand and the marginal product of your labor. I would say there are probably fewer CEOs who can take a company from startup to unicorn status than there are really good founding engineers out there, so CEOs tend to get more equity in a company. Sometimes the founding engineer knows something that nobody else in the world does, so their equity reflects that. It's also a reflection of how much risk the engineer is willing to take on (they'll probably take a salary cut to be a founding engineer, and they also risk the company randomly running out of runway and finding themself suddenly unemployed). But it has nothing to do with what you deserve. Maybe if the CEO/President is a sentimental type, he'll award you equity based on how much he feels you deserve but ultimately it's about supply and demand. If a CEO puts in 90 hours a week at a tobacco company while his engineers put in 20 hours a week, does he deserve lots of money (and therefore a more comfortable life) because he puts more effort into killing people? Or does he deserve every bad thing that happens to him because he decided to spend his limited time on this earth making it a worse place?