HACKER Q&A
📣 sashank_1509

How much compensation do the early employees of a startup make?


How much equity do say the first 30 employees of a startup make? Let us say the company reaches a market cap of 1 billion dollars, is it likely that 100 million goes to the employees (10%) or even lower or higher?

Asking for mainly software/ AI startups and would love to hear from people with first hand experience or knowledge and less speculation.

  👤 Eridrus Accepted Answer ✓
The answer is always "it depends", but <10% is the right ballpark. I would say 5-10% is probably what you would expect to go to employees depending on the specific trajectory things went.

Generally, companies start by creating an options pool of 10% of shares for employees, but they do not expect to blow through it. It really depends on who they hire though, what those employees value, how the company is doing, etc. The equity compensation employees get also decreases pretty steeply by employee number.