Earlier quoted context omitted.
to be blunt as well , I am pretty sure that you primarily want my skills to help you solve your problem , being excited and not capable will not get you far which you can see from 99% of poorly executed startups go cheap will not get you far and from history we know how drinking kool aid ends up
I completely agree that being excited and not capable will not get the engineer and the company far. Yet being capable and only interested in the paycheck will not make an engineer understand the customer and what the problem being solved is. In a start up with a team of 10 or less (including all roles), it's critical everyone is excited about what the start up is doing. Actually if you look at the history of success…
99% of startups don't solve hard problems (it seem hard to them because they are inexperienced and excited but in all reality not so challenging ) , that doesn't mean they don't have good business idea but technical aspect is mostly easy , challenges usually come with scale which happens later
financial upside for 0.2% equity end 100Mil exit is --> 200000 at best and that is not much so where is that upside for somebody taking 80K instead 140k over 4 years ? Not to mention that probability of that happening is low to start with
in small startup it would be essential to have extremely qualified people , excitement should be secondary
I do what I do because I love it but that doesn't mean I have to do that for free or cheap so correlation between asking for fair price and not being excited (passionate) about what you do is mostly not there
I worked in couple of startups (last one had exit 500Mil) but I was paid market rate and that is mostly a reason why they succeeded (got high quality people knowing exactly what they are doing)