I find it interesting if not a little disconcerting that the equity table has the startup hiring a COO at 2% - 5% equity but no CTO and the closest it has listed is "Lead Engineer" at 0.5% - 1%. I suppose there could be a VP of engineering under that chart since it doesn't specify what type of VP.<p>This article seems to be propagating the myth that engineers need MBA types more than they need engineers.<p>The article also advocates heavy contracting.<p>Speaking from experience, if you are contracting out most of your software engineering and don't have a CTO type role who knows what good code is and knows how to manage the contractors, you are in for a really bad time when you do decide to bring on full time software engineers. You risk overpaying and risk having completely unmaintainable code that doesn't scale with your business.<p>Conversely, much of what a COO does can be done by the CEO at early stages.<p>Of course, no two startups are the same. In fact, a bad CTO can be more damaging that not having any. Which is why it is important you screen your hires well. However, your milage may vary.
A curious bit:<p>> Rookies: Won’t always request equity, Experienced: More likely to request equity<p>Is this really true? I would think it's the opposite--the rookie has not yet felt the sting of swapping salary for worthless equity and would be more likely to value equity higher, whereas the veteran will know better...<p>The whole section on equity convinces me that I'm not joining a start-up any time soon. 1-3% for hires 1-5? Fractional percentages for everyone else? What a joke. That's what passes for early-stage equity? These are the people who are literally building your company. People seem to be falling for it though, and start-ups seem to have no trouble hiring, so who am I to argue?
> Ask them if they’d like to have a quick phone call<p>And that's how you fail to get introverted people interested. I'd have to be deaperatelly pissed off at my current position to want to voice chat about "great new opportunity" without getting all the details in writing first...
A wise move to write a guide like this as content marketing. The key market for rocketshp appears to be early stage founders. This is a problem faced by that segment for sure.