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I've only heard of a couple of these myself, but I'd love to hear some other anecdotes. Do you know someone who joined a startup and took a decent piece of equity, e.g. 1-5%? I've heard you're more likely to get something like this if you come in as "GC + X", typically because larger equity pieces only go to earlier employees like the first few senior hires, and a standard GC usually comes later.

I work with a lot of cap tables and a GC getting a full 1% of a company sounds pretty rich to me and unlikely. 0.5% of a small company would probably be good.

Glad you asked for anecdotes because I think this is super fact-dependent, but someone I worked with a few years ago moved to a startup as their first GC at 2-3% but gave up a lot in terms of baseline comp to get that.

pleapeddler wrote:Glad you asked for anecdotes because I think this is super fact-dependent, but someone I worked with a few years ago moved to a startup as their first GC at 2-3% but gave up a lot in terms of baseline comp to get that.

Yeah agreed, it's all over the place but I do think a much smaller percentage for a GC is typically the norm, more like 1% or less as the other poster suggested. But I've heard of a few getting larger slices (and usually does come with a salary cut), so wanted to hear from others.