Interviewing and negotiating for a VPE role

Equity and equity terms

Typical equity for a VPE role is 0.50 - 2%, depending on the size and maturity of the company.

If you can, these can make a big difference in the upside. Your ability to negotiate for these can vary, but they’re worth it.

Early exercise of options. Early exercise means you purchase before the option is vested. You’d do this to reduce taxes which will be based in part on the spread between the strike price and the current FMV. If you purchase at the time of grant, there’s no spread. If you go down this road, make sure you understand what happens if you leave the company before those options vest.
Right to sell options to a private party prior to a liquidity event.
Longer term post-termination clauses. Unless you’re joining a company one or two years from a liquidity event, you’re taking a large risk that you’re going to stay with the company for a LONG time if you want to have any sort of equity payout. It is not especially common for people to negotiate for this. But this means when you leave, you usually lose any options unless you have the cash to buy them when you leave. Jade has done negotiation for this as a part of contract roles. And there are companies that do it for ALL employees. Jade even read a blog post once saying it was the direction that startups were trending towards. But.. there weren’t a lot of people that had negotiated for this.

“I like to ask about the last couple of departures (especially from the executive team). Why did they leave and whose decision was it?”
I might also request to see the most recent board deck.
“Ask to meet 1-2 board members or investors as part of your interview process. This should be easily managed for a series A company. Why are they excited about this company? What do they think of the CEO? Do they easily show confidence in the CEO and value-prop? Or are there hints that there may be a difficult relationship between the investors and the founders? What’s the runway and how long before they have to raise again? You want to ask this to get an idea of how they balance building for growth vs being fiscally conservative — IMO you don’t want them to come down too far on either side. For me, it usually comes down liking the people I work with and finding the product interesting/fun.”
Lethain has great advice he offers here: https://lethain.com/getting-engineering-executive-job/