Thats a really good question that I'm unfortunately not qualified to answer. When I said "real stake", to an extent I mostly just meant being a founder or an executive, where you have a seat at the table and if your shares are going to be diluted, at least you're trading it for something.
As an employee, for some of these equity packages you'd almost need an MBA to decipher if they're any good with all the things that can happen, so I usually don't even bother and just go to places that pay fairly or have interesting work.
Maybe a simple way to think about it: if your market salary is 100k, and they offer you 60k/yr and 2% of the company, is that 2% of the company worth 40k? (And how far can they dilute it?) To me that generally sounds like a bad deal, but your milage might vary depending on the circumstances.
yeah also I forgot to mention that there are no benefits yet and I'm having to pay health insurance on my own... the only reason I've not left is its buying me time to work on a side project while having some income stream
As an employee, for some of these equity packages you'd almost need an MBA to decipher if they're any good with all the things that can happen, so I usually don't even bother and just go to places that pay fairly or have interesting work.
Maybe a simple way to think about it: if your market salary is 100k, and they offer you 60k/yr and 2% of the company, is that 2% of the company worth 40k? (And how far can they dilute it?) To me that generally sounds like a bad deal, but your milage might vary depending on the circumstances.