"Divide their annual recurring revenue by the total headcount. If that number is below $150K, the company is either pre–product market fit or scaling too early."

Most of the time, if you are a technical person joining a company that already has revenue, you are probably already too late for a significant equity stake. And if a company already has $300k of revenue per employee, I'd have trouble calling it a "start-up". Just my experience - I am sure there are exceptions.

Some of the other advice is good - finding out how many shares are outstanding and the current valuation is the info you need to judge what the shares in your offer might be worth. I agree that if the company is evasive on this info, it is a red flag.

Start-ups are risky - but if it doesn't work out, move on. It isn't the end of your career.

I think around twenty years ago or so I was getting contacted by recruiters so much - like daily - that I decided to hide my LinkedIn account. I logged in but there was no option to make me invisible. So I decided to just delete the account but at that time there was no option to delete your account. I tried to contact them to be deleted but no response.

So I changed all of my content. I said I worked at a hot dog stand named hot hot hot and my speciality was hot dogs and a bunch of other bs.

For years after I would go to parties in sf and someone would ask me for my LinkedIn contact and I'd explain the situation. Some people would exclaim 'you're the hot hot hot guy?!'

I changed the email address on the account to something fake so I was never able to recover it but I think it's finally gone.

I later had a xing account and they refused to delete it when I asked them to, so I just changed all of the content to me complaining about xing not deleting my account. They deleted not long after.

I guess I don't do well with resume sites.

> I have seen people join for equity only to discover they were last in line on the cap table.

As an engineer, you always will be last. And there are a lot of ways you can be _legally_ screwed.