Four year vesting and one year cliff is a market term for founders and employees in funded and pre-funding startups.  Vesting over 3 years is totally reasonable in your situation.<p>3% though?  Not in bounds.  If you&#x27;re the technical guy there on day one and you don&#x27;t receive a market salary or reasonable facsimile thereof every two weeks, you&#x27;re a technical co-founder whether you want to be or not.  Your deal is exploitative.  You will likely not successfully negotiate a non-exploitative deal.  (Presumption should be 33%, not 30%, and very definitely not 10%.  No difference between the cofounders is meaningful as T approaches 5 years from now; if there is a meaningful difference, that person probably shouldn&#x27;t be a co-founder.)<p>Everyone in this conversation is a businessman.  They&#x27;ve underbid for your services.  I strongly advise turning in your two week&#x27;s notice and washing your hands of this.  Your equity, whether or not you&#x27;ve actually been issued it, is equity in a company run by operators who are not dealing fairly with their technical co-founder and who are either comfortable with lying or clueless.  No fact which I&#x27;ve just recited would cause me to think &quot;This equity is worth more than typical startup equity&quot;, which is worth nothing.<p>&gt;&gt; He tells me I&#x27;m too &quot;9 to 5&quot; security focused<p>This is a common line.  It is just that: a line.  It gets cynically deployed against engineers on a regular basis by people who are not willing or able to pay market wages.  You should interpret this line as nothing other than &quot;I am unwilling or unable to pay market wages&quot; and act accordingly.<p>&gt;&gt; He keeps telling me that I need to trust him and that he&#x27;ll reward people down the road based on their performance.<p>99% of the people told variants of this line will be screwed by the people offering this term.  As a direct consequence, entrepreneurs who are presently cash-poor but who want to incentivize employees&#x2F;partners&#x2F;etc <i>do not say this</i>; they say variants of &quot;Here&#x27;s a third of the company&quot; or &quot;I will commit to consequential cash payments in writing contingent on us achieving milestones together.&quot;<p>&quot;I will pay you a number amenable to me, at a time of my choosing, if and only if I feel like paying you&quot; is not an offer.<p>I will close with the observation that now is among the best times in the history of ever to be an engineer capable of shipping projects.  You have better options.  Exploring them for two weeks ROFLstomps the value of continuing to work for this company.