What's the largest equity role you've held?

In a YC unicorn, ~%0.175 give or take (out of 0.2% granted, employee 10-15). In other orgs, various amounts depending on how my contribution is valued (grinding on a keyboard, advising, etc). In my most recent role, they gave me a ton of RSUs for essentially "head of security" at a fintech reporting to a CISO.

My point is that if you're not asking about ownership, you should be. My personal financial situation is not representative of the broad working class. Lots of luck involved too, but asking is mostly free.

More resources I've previously posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405708

Parent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28401655

I'm building something, and approaching investment stage.

Really like the "cut of your jib" - are you currently interested in hearing about opportunities?

Definitely interested if I can materially contribute. Email in profile, looking forward to hearing what you're building and how I can help.

Whatever the amount of shares I have in my publicly traded employer/the total amount of outstanding shares.

No less than 49% I hope!

Equity is something else, right? Actors aren't given shares of the studio in return for making a show; they're given a % of the sales. (A looooow % based on this article.)

Equity in software is weird. At small companies, it's pretty much like winning the lottery. (I got $0 per share I owned the last time around. That's about what I valued it at, so no big deal.) At big companies, your work probably doesn't play any role in affecting the stock price.

For that reason, I think residuals are a unique thing not covered by equity. Having said that, I'm mostly kidding. The "we pay you for the hours you show up" is a relatively fair model and has worked well in our industry.

My point of this subthread is that royalties, dividends, equity, whatever are all just mechanisms to reward based on upside in a collective endeavor, and can be negotiated as a compensation component. If you're functioning within capitalism, the idea that you keep getting paid for something you're not actively working on shouldn't be foreign. Look no further than your index funds, whether growth or income producing securities. What makes royalties unpalatable with these concepts in mind? Not much different than VTI, SCHD, etc (public securities, growth and income producing respectively, if you're unfamiliar). You have acquired an asset in some manner (either paying for it with fiat or with your time), and you are holding it for future economic benefit.

For example: I receive dividends from a friend's vending machine business I invested in to help them rapidly scale up (including me lugging vending machines to locations, setting up infra to monitor remotely and accept payments, etc). That is no different than equity in a SaaS product or someone's contributions to a major motion picture.

I agree there is a lot of nuance (ie all of your points), but the conversation should be "how is ownership valued and distributed? is it reasonable and equitable?"

> Equity in software is weird. At small companies, it's pretty much like winning the lottery

What’s weird about it? Stock in public companies are also “equity”. It’s not winning the lottery in that case. I know my shares of AMZN are going to be worth something as they vest.

That’s the reason I refuse to work for a startup at this point in my life. It was bad enough when my RSUs dropped from $140 to $90 by the time my first shares vested (back to $130 now and I got a refresher that mostly made up for it). But that’s a kid better than waiting for an exit.