Quick summary guide to what you want your option equity grant to be like:<p>1. Must have an 83(b) election process, and give a bonus to cover pre-exercise cost OR:<p>2. No expiry after leaving the company, instead should just convert to NSOs AND<p>3. If possible, options should expire after 15-20 years with the longer time horizons to IPO today compared to 7 years ago. Facebook for example took 8 years from founding to IPO. Even if you stay employed at facebook for the entire time, you could have lost all of your stock for example.<p>4. Vesting cliffs should be no longer than 1 year.<p>If you are unwilling or incapable to pre-exercise your startup stock, then equivalent RSU grants are superior to stock option grants.  Even most $1bb startup employees have a very hard time finding people to buy their stock outside of company secondaries when the company is private.<p>----<p>What you give up at a startup as a sr. engineer vs bigco:<p>1. Saleable within 1 year +$100k&#x2F;yr equity grants.  These equity grants can then be used in other investments, such as a house down payment or otherwise.  Give them a bonus of %7 annual compounded interest.<p>2. Higher salaries<p>3. Bonuses<p>4. Some benefits which may have high amount of financial benefits for your situation, such as paid parental leave.<p>5. Hours worked.<p>Make sure that the startup offer can beat a big co offer if a +$100mm  sale event happens by a good margin.  If your startup offer cannot beat that, then working at that startup will have a near certain chance of having a big financial downside compared to working at bigco.  Working at bigco is the index fund of tech work, make sure your startup &#x27;investment&#x27; at least has a chance of beating the index fund.