The company recently got $3M investment. I’m being offered $152k salary and 2% equity, vested over 4 years. Is this good?
My thinking is that 2% of $3M is about $60k, so I could treat that as an extra $15k per year. But if I look at the valuation based on that investment, it is probably worth 5x that, like an extra $75k per year. All in all it is over $200k compensation, which I’m grateful for, but it’s on par with a tech job at a big tech company. Are these reasonable assumptions, or am I missing something?
This is the happy path.
The unhappy path is not actually that it all crashes and burns quickly but that it grows slowly and you put years into a company that goes nowhere.
OP should make sure they have enough visibility into the business to understand how the actual business is going so that if things are not actually going well, they can bail. That should start with knowing not just the funding raised, but the total valuation. But they should ask them about their business metrics (if they have any).
Having said all that, 2% is an abnormally large chunk of equity unless they are employee #1, and unless you are actually making a big sacrifice to be here, it sounds like they value you.