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Equity is worthless for a startup. Be ok to realize you’re working for 110k and lotto tickets
2.5 years out of school and making 110 base? Come on now don't listen to these folks and be greedy and lose offer.
To answer the original point, 110K base plus an 80K equity package seems pretty typical for someone with 2.5 years of consulting experience. You can try negotiating for a bit more but I wouldn’t expect them to go too much higher. More important for you to ask yourself whether your truly believe in the business, because in the long run, how successful the company is will matter a lot more than your base salary or how many % pts you can negotiate for. It’s obviously hard to predict success for startups, but you have to do your own thinking and maybe ask friends who work in VC if you have any. Also, find out who the investors are in the startup you’re working for. If there are big, prominent names, that’s a good signal and even if the company does fail, saying that you worked at a company backed by Sequoia or A16z will carry weight.
As for $250
Find me the person that will give you cash for it.
90% of startups fail first year, remainder mostly cash out at break even for investors, 0.1% achieve unicorn status. So yea that’s a lottery ticket statistic
Said differently, there is technically value, but the expected value is so small as to be worthless
Equity is not worthless.
@BCG1 First of all there are secondary markets where you can find people to buy your equity so there’s the answer to your “find me someone who will give you cash for it.” And yes, 90% of startups fail but not all startups have the same risk profile. There’s a big difference between a seed-stage startup with no revenue and a startup that’s already raised multiple rounds and has $1M+ revenue. In the latter case, a lot has been derisked and the failure rate is going to be a lot lower than 90%.
And if OP is getting a $110K base I highly doubt they’re a seed stage pre-revenue company.
Bain & Company coming in with the knowledge drop.
Roles like this aren’t particularly rare. Sometimes they’re called Chief of Staff to the CEO, at other places your title might be Head of Business Development or Strategy, but at the end of the day your job is to come in and be a jack of all trades type who can plug in and get shit done. Great role for people looking to get operational experience so congrats.
@BCG1 There certainly can be a difference. I know a guy who joined LinkedIn early and his equity bought him a pretty sick luxury condo in SF. Have another friend who’s at a company that’s about to IPO (not one you’ll have heard of unless you track enterprise SaaS companies very closely) and he’s going to make out handsomely. Of course there are also companies that go bust and your equity ends up being worth peanuts (I worked at one myself), but it’s folly to not value the upside at all.
@D2 not true. Lots of startups love hiring people with 2-3 years of consulting experience. In fact I’d say they prefer it. It’s usually a lot harder to recruit more senior consultants because they tend to have much higher compensation expectations and are used to managing peoples with lots of resources at their disposal. When you’re 30+ and you’re married with kids soon to come or already here, taking a big pay cut to join a startup is a lot harder to do.
Check out join-startups.com or websites like Vettery or underdog.io and you’ll find plenty of junior roles on the business side
Base and bonus is the same from where i am at (big 4)
That’s the problem. You are evaluating where you are with where you are going when it comes to compensation. This is not a like for like comparison. Your current base and bonus are guaranteed within a range. At startup it can be zero and you wouldn’t know until the day it was paid. Good luck
Unrelated to the comp part of this, can I ask what position you're negotiating for at this startup? In my experience (also at/around the 2.5 year post-undergrad), you aren't very valuable at this level unless you're a skilled programmer or something. No one is seemingly hiring strategy/ product guys at our junior level.
Thanks. I asked for a higher base
Why is equity worthless for a startup?
Distinction without a difference
Yes
^^ what r u saying?
Crazy!
Thanks everyone. I managed to negotiate a 15% increase in my cash comp. This startup is backed by top tier vcs and banks and just raised a big round of funding as well. The role is unique in startup (not engineer and pm) so It is very easy to identify if i reveal. I will essentially be the CEO’s right arm to manage various aspects of his startup.
I’ve heard wildly different things on equity. Some say, negotiate more equity not more cash if you can live on the cash. Others say it’s a complete lotto ticket. I think it’s somewhere in between — for seed, it’s a lotto ticket; for others, read the details of the equity offer to understand if you can only cash out if they IPO or if you also receive part of the sales price if they are bought out.