Thanks for your take. I don't think he's looking to convince people to work on the cheap, though. Of course he doesn't want to give money away, but he's clear he wants to pay both money and equity (I think he was talking options; I have no idea what's a good idea or what's reasonable).

I get your point though that if everybody shares equally in the company, everybody has their incentives aligned, and it doesn't matter much how you balance money versus equity value, because everybody is in the same boat.

On whether this counts as startup or not: it's not a restaurant. It's something that could scale globally and to billions of users. I think it adds the most value to users in western Europe, and particularly cities like Amsterdam, but it adds some value to everybody everywhere. It could get really big, but we're happy with just being big in a couple of western European countries.

What it isn't is the kind of startup that has no business model beyond investors and getting bought by Facebook or Google. This could work as an independent company. And if we can get the right subsidies, this could even work without early investors dilluting our equity. He's also looking at crowdfunding, because you can also build a community around this. I have my doubts about whether that's a good idea (at least at an early stage), and he seems to be coming around to my line of reasoning.

> One of the features of a startup in the technical sense is a focus on the growth in the value of equity creates a better alignment of interests among investors and employee shareholders [in a startup in the technical sense, founders are employees].

So how does that work? Do all employees get a similar amount of salary+equity? It's possible he's doing exactly the thing you say, and I just don't understand. He did propose starting at a valuation of € 1000, at something like 100,000 shares of €0.10, which I didn't understand (my gut reaction would be that I'd like to buy this company for that amount, because he's already invested more into it than that), but maybe the point is that it grows as everybody, including him, gets the same salary+equity. (Though I still wonder if that's fair to him, considering how much time and money he's already put into this.)

I think this is easily the point I understand the least about.

I don't see this as building someone else's idea for free. The worst that could happen is that I might slightly less money working on someone that's interesting and exciting, than I would working on something that's boring but safe. And that's assuming the project fails.

I honestly have no idea what the salary would be. I personally feel like a €100.000+ salary would be too much for a startup looking for its initial funding, but on the other hand, my salary can't be that much lower than that either; it's going to be in that order of magnitude anyway, so maybe I should stop worrying that my salary might be a problem for a starting company.

The reasons I would want to do this with him are: * It's a good idea and I think it will work * He put a lot of effort into it already and has contact with relevant stakeholders * I think he's honest * It's an interesting thing to work on, and it will be an educational experience even if it does ultimately fail