To add to your list: as an early employee, there is a good chance that your equity will get diluted a bit. The small fraction of the company you "own" when you join (and after your options fully vest) might shrink significantly after future funding rounds. As an employee you have little leverage against getting diluted.
The worst statistic of all: the vast majority of employees never exercise their stock options. According to this article, less than 5% of employee stock options are ever exercised: https://medium.com/@henrysward/broken-cap-tables-bbf84574a76... Start-ups would love for you to take a lower than market rate salary in exchange for options as the risk is entirely leveraged to the employee.
If you are going to work for a start-up you should never count your options as payment in lieu of salary. They are a lottery ticket and they are no substitute for cold hard cash. There are various other good reasons one might have for joining a start-up, but options should not be one of those reasons.
During my last job search, I was contacted by several companies with seed funding (not even series A). They wanted to lowball a salary and then give 1% or less equity to "make up for it".
Hahahahahahaha. Haha. Ha. Are you serious? For an early non-founder employee, startups might as well be scams.
Pretend the company is valued at $1m. Pretend you consider a standard programmer's salary to be $100k. If they offer you a $75k salaray, you are saving them $25k/year. Assuming you'd be there for 4 years (because that's how often most vesting periods are), you are saving them $100k. $100k of the company's $1m comes from your substandard salary. So you should get $100k in equity. That's 10%.
If they try to convince you that you don't deserve that much because the value of the company will rise in the future, ask them where the signed term sheets for the next round are.
A company today is worth however many billions it will be worth if it succeeds, discounted by the risk that it won't succeed. That's an incredibly difficult calculation to make, but fortunately you don't have to do it if the company recently had a funding round, just use the value the other investors decided on.
So if the company raised money at $10MM and you're being offered 0.5% equity, then treat it as a $50,000 bonus that you get for being a loyal employee over the vesting period.
The worst statistic of all: the vast majority of employees never exercise their stock options. According to this article, less than 5% of employee stock options are ever exercised: https://medium.com/@henrysward/broken-cap-tables-bbf84574a76... Start-ups would love for you to take a lower than market rate salary in exchange for options as the risk is entirely leveraged to the employee.
If you are going to work for a start-up you should never count your options as payment in lieu of salary. They are a lottery ticket and they are no substitute for cold hard cash. There are various other good reasons one might have for joining a start-up, but options should not be one of those reasons.