How do you express that as a percentage in equity? Also, it really seems pointless, because as they take on more funding guess whose “huge stake” gets diluted.

And that's a risk that founders need to take into account -- that by diluting their early engineers' equity, they're risking losing those engineers.

got an offer to be the 20th employee or something in a startup as a senior engineer, and they offered me 0.01% of equity or something. I thought that was ridiculously low.

EDIT: Of course my whole calculation was wrong.

Well, it first seemed low to me as well.

But 0.01% of one million is ten thousand, which doesn't sound that bad. One million also seems low for a successful company. The same offer would give you ten billion at apple.

Disclaimer: I am not good at math and I don't understand stocks, equity etc. So maybe I am completely wrong.

> But 0.01% of one million is ten thousand

1,000,000 USD * (0.01 / 100) = 100 USD, not 10,000 USD. The company would have to be worth 100M USD for 0.01% to be worth 10,000 USD.

> Disclaimer: I am not good at math [...]

Indeed ;-) But don't worry, many a great engineer has made worse mistakes when it comes to shifting the decimal point.

Ah damn, you see, that's how incapable I am with maths :D I just calculated one million * 0.01 and thought that'll be it. Thanks for correcting me, seems like 0.01 isn't that much after all.

Fortunately my job does not require math skills, so at least I am no danger to society :D