Recently, I was offered the founding engineer (#1 employee) at a vertical SAAS company in the food industry. The comp is 160k for 3% equity. The caveat is that I would be the first technical employee, both co founders are non technical.

The 2 co founders are genuinely very impressive and seem very smart. One of them has a lot of connections in this space so they have a way to reach customers. The company is pre revenue and pre product and raised 3M seed against 10M.

If I came in, I’d essentially be doing the work of a technical co founder with a fraction of the upside.

I’m very conflicted on this. One part of me yearns to work in the startup space, I eventually want to start my own and this could be a stepping stone in terms of getting a better network (I feel my network is currently lacking) and if there’s any time in my life where risk is not an issue it would be now.

On the other side, I think I’m getting a really bad deal here, I’d build out the entire product and barely get anything in return. The financials only really make sense if this company gets a 100M exit within like 5-6 years, but with how AI is progressing I’m not even sure SAAS will be a viable business model in coming years.

Has anyone made these types of decisions before? Looking back are you glad you made that decision? Would you change anything?

TLDR; big tech employee conflicted about becoming the first technical employee at a startup with no product and would like advice from others who have gone down this path.