YC / More "official" resources

YC video by Tim Brady - How Much Equity Should I Give My First Employees (2021)
- Option pool of 10 - 20%
- Outside CEO gets 5%, outside CTO 3%
- Employee #1 (typically an engineer) gets between 1 - 2% (max you can see is 3%)
- Be generous, nobody successful ever said "I was too generous with early employees"
**Compensation at Startups - article by Homebrew VC (rec. by Gustaf)**
- Doesn't mention specifically first employees
- Pay average market salary (50th percentile) and over-equitize (75th percentile)
- Act as if your compensation data is public (people figure out eventually), be able to justify everything
**Holloway Guide to Equity Compensation ← great resource**
- Typical Employee Equity Levels - link to chapter
  - Seed equity levels (highest you can see in SV, not typical)
  - Series A equity levels
Index Ventures - Rewarding Talent, a guide to Stock Options for European Entrepeneurs
- great guide with a lot of data points, from one of top funds
- Calculating initial grants at Seed - link to chapter
  - Benchmark for comp given in US seed-stage startups (2018)
  - Example of calculating option grants as a percentage of salary (EU seed)
**The Equity Equation by PG** (2007)
- After giving n%, what I am left with must be more valuable than before
- Example: two founders hiring an additional hacker (company stage not mentioned specifically, prob very early)

Less "official" resources

**Techcrunch article - Deciding How Much Equity To Give To Your Early Employees (2020)**
- Anu Shukla from RewardsPay
- She was hiring VP Engineering, gave him 3% (although 1.5 - 2% is more standard)
  - Not sure at which stage, but I think she was early (hiring VP eng to build the team and tech)
- At a company’s earliest stages, expect to give a senior engineer as much as 1% of a company, the handbook advises, but an experienced business development employee is typically given a .35% cut. An engineer coming in at the mid-level can expect .45% versus .15% for a junior engineer.
- If a key hire is the third person joining a two-person team, he or she can almost be considered a co-founder and may get as much as 10% of the company. But if a head of sales or VP of marketing joins once a startup has a product to sell and promote, they may get between 1% and 2%, depending on experience.