As a solo founder, how much equity should I give the first employee or advisor who is helping me before I can pay a salary?
The short answer
An advisor is not a co-founder: think 0.25% to 1% on standard vesting, not 10%. An early employee working for below-market pay might get 0.5% to 2% depending on how early and how critical, always on a 4-year vest with a 1-year cliff. Be generous with cash-poor helpers but ruthless about vesting, because the person who ghosts you in month three should not walk away owning a chunk of your company.
Go deeper, your way
3 hand-picked resources, 3 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.
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Why we picked it
This is the empirical spine for the employee half of your answer, built on Carta data from 50,000 real cap tables, not opinion. It shows equity drops fast: hire #1 sits around 1.5% at median (0.5% to 4% range), hire #2 at 0.85%, hire #3 already near 0.5%. That anchors your 0.5% to 2% call for a genuinely early, critical below-market hire and tells you exactly how fast to shrink grants as you keep hiring.
Why we picked it
Once you have decided a key hire gets an ESOP grant and not co-founder shares, this is the India-specific playbook for actually doing it: pool sizing (5% to 15%), the mandatory one-year minimum vesting the Companies Act imposes, exercise price at fair market value, and the DPIIT-recognised-startup carve-outs. It is the practical alternative to over-granting equity, written for the Indian cap table you are actually running.
Why we picked it
This is the canonical, industry-standard answer to 'how much equity for an advisor', a free, ready-to-sign template used by tens of thousands of founders and advisors a year. It replaces awkward negotiation with a simple grid that maps engagement level and company stage to an equity number and vesting schedule.
