Just saw this comment. Not sure if you will see the response. You raise a really good point.
If someone is joining a startup at an early stage, work like it is your own baby. You are spending your most valuable currency by being here - which is your time!
With time, hopefully, you will get rewarded for your effort and results. You will likely not get a founder level say and stake but your role should gradually expand. In the end founders take almost the same risk as the first employee, but get a lot more equity because founder was there at the start. Join a startup as an early employee only if you are able to accept this fact - otherwise you are setting yourself up for a lot of resentment and pain.
This above advise applied to me too for the first two years of my employment, before I started working on the ultimate successful product. We were building an offline search engine and as a part of that I build distributed file systems, crawled a billion pages and I was appropriately rewarded with career growth.
However with the new social product that I built, the situation was dramatically different. For that product I was there from day 0. I was owning the whole engineering (sole engineer at start and head engineering till I left) and significant portion of product. Till we got 5M users, I had a co-founder level say (but not the stake of course) and I worked with a co-founder level of involvement and dedication till that time. However once we got 5M users, multiple levels above me started doing meetings and taking critical decisions without involving me. I still had a co-founder level passion and it hurt to see the product flounder and being unable to do anything about it.
So I was in a uniquely bad situation and it is not common to be in this situation. However if someone really is and there is no way to get a founder level control - move out as soon as you can. And this is what I did - albeit 2 years too late.
If someone is joining a startup at an early stage, work like it is your own baby. You are spending your most valuable currency by being here - which is your time!
With time, hopefully, you will get rewarded for your effort and results. You will likely not get a founder level say and stake but your role should gradually expand. In the end founders take almost the same risk as the first employee, but get a lot more equity because founder was there at the start. Join a startup as an early employee only if you are able to accept this fact - otherwise you are setting yourself up for a lot of resentment and pain.
This above advise applied to me too for the first two years of my employment, before I started working on the ultimate successful product. We were building an offline search engine and as a part of that I build distributed file systems, crawled a billion pages and I was appropriately rewarded with career growth.
However with the new social product that I built, the situation was dramatically different. For that product I was there from day 0. I was owning the whole engineering (sole engineer at start and head engineering till I left) and significant portion of product. Till we got 5M users, I had a co-founder level say (but not the stake of course) and I worked with a co-founder level of involvement and dedication till that time. However once we got 5M users, multiple levels above me started doing meetings and taking critical decisions without involving me. I still had a co-founder level passion and it hurt to see the product flounder and being unable to do anything about it.
So I was in a uniquely bad situation and it is not common to be in this situation. However if someone really is and there is no way to get a founder level control - move out as soon as you can. And this is what I did - albeit 2 years too late.