Presumably at Oxide’s stage, the equity is the towards financial independence vehicle and the salary is covering the bills until that lottery ticket is scratched off and its value determined.

In this case, you are being paid $15K per month to work to make that ticket pay off.

Does everyone have equity? Does everyone have the same amount? Does everyone have the same terms?

If not, then the differentiation in compensation just moved to whatever liquidity event.

Bryan hinted pretty strongly in the article that the answer was “yes” to the first and “no” to the second.

Why should it be the same? If I join a year after you, I sure as hell hope you have more, all else being equal. If we join the same day and you are twice as critical to the success, I hope you have more, because your incentive pulls my outcomes higher.

OK, sure, but you can make versions of those exact same arguments for salary as well. The point is that the Oxide team has made a point of not making them, or even making the counterarguments.

However, amount of and terms around equity are part of the overall compensation package, and if the principles espoused in the document are relevant to salary, then they should also be relevant to the equity component of compensation as well, no?

IMO, not to the same degree. If you view salary as the necessary good to offset the daily evil costs of life, it makes sense for that to be the same and linked such that everyone gets raises at the same time and amount.

For equity, earlier grants are at a riskier time (and where your contributions are more concentrated and influential). Earlier employees should get more (not just have more after 2 years compared to the new joiner, but for their first grant to be vesting more next year than today’s joiner’s first grant).

There’s are things that I personally wouldn’t like about the scheme, but I think it’s quite hard to make a “it’s too unfair” principles-based argument against it.