Ask HN: I've been offered some equity for work as Employee #1

This generally depends on your personal needs.

1. Do you have another job? 2. Can you afford to work for the amount they are willing to pay you? 3. A general rule of thumb is that you always renegotiate. Once you reach salary negotiation you're pretty much going to be hired, and the worst they can do is say no.

You need to figure out if you can work for equity over cash. How viable is the company?

It sounds like you'd be more or less a co-founder. Why are you only getting 10% and not 1/3? Do you really think their "idea" is worth that much? Ask for 1/3 and align your interests with the other co-founders if you really want to do this.

I have to second gallerytungsten's comment.

I've been approached a dozen times by business people offering me equity for my development time. I committed to and completed three projects and nothing ever came of them. Thankfully it only amounted to ~1000 hours among the three projects, but it's still time I wasn't paid for.

A technical co-founder with no work experience doesn't sound like much of a "technical" co-founder. Has he worked on any sort of open source projects, done research at a university, or anything that could be considered experience? If not, then it's not a good sign.

If you can afford to spare the time, then by all means take the opportunity, but I'd ask for 33% and wouldn't settle for less than 25%. Just state that you feel you'd be playing an important role in the product's creation and expect a more equitable share. You're allowed to put any price you want on your time. If they're confident the venture will succeed, then they should relinquish some of their share, otherwise they're being a bit greedy.

Looking over the 7 comments so far on this, I suggest you trust your instincts that this isn't a tremendously well-conceived business. Find someone else whose Rails skills you find are roughly comparable to yours, and say you are too booked to commit to sling the code for them, but you would be happy to serve in a technical advisory / oversight capacity as a board member, and here's this other Rails coder who should be able to serve your needs almost as well. Typical board member time commitment is no more than 16 hours a month for a director who is conscientious, with no chair commitments on a board, but one who preps for the board meetings, is available for ad-hoc and committee meetings, etc. Typical compensation is entirely equity, around 2% at the pre-seed stage for each director. Read up on what board of directors do in a startup if you take this advice and use it, before you approach them; don't go overboard, an evening spent Googling around is sufficient at your stage with these guys, you just need to get a feel for the boundary between guidance / advice and operations.

This delivers several objectives:

* Puts out the message: your professional time is outbidding their bid in the market. * Retain the relationship for a more manageable time commitment. * Allows them to get strategic-level technical advice from you "for free" (for now), and implement in the trenches as they see fit. * Gives them a starting point for another in the trenches implementer.

Expertise matters a lot. Execution matters more.

It can cost very little to offer general board-level guidance (making sure they are asking the right questions) using your expertise if like in your situation you are favorably disposed to the parties. It should cost very dear for you to use your expertise to execute.