There are many pieces of advice that can be said, but what I would say is this:

Don't bottle all of this in; it'll only build resentment.

Be humble, speak your mind appropriately and professionally, and after you've done so, lean on the tech lead and manager for direction.

My first startup was founded with a non-technical co-founder; they had no vast experience in what we were founding, but was a good salesman.

In the end, they were useless, and I walked away from the company.

Make sure everything is in writing, and if you're a technical co-founder, make sure your co-founder is someone you can respect.

Yes to those last couple of lines.

I started to pursue a Masters of Divinity, but quickly dropped out as I came to terms that my motivation was primarily to "have the upper-hand" in conversations. (Not to mention I can't set aside 6 years of my life for school right now).

Do you value money more, or "kudos" from the internet more?

Somewhere there lies your answer.

Be transparent with the company.

Tell them what you expected vs. what you got and work it out.

Is there an alternative mechanism (outside an employment agreement) through which options can be granted?

From another Hacker News: discussion on the topic: "The rule of thumb when I started contracting was that your hourly rate was your annual salary divided by 1000"

So if the offer was $100,000, your hourly rate as a contractor is now $100/hr

That would be over double the offer amount!! I don't think that would fly.

I have done some contracting before and my rate is far higher than my employment rate, but it's always been for smaller contracts... not for something that is effectively a full time position.

I am not an accountant or anything but I think a rule of thumb is employment costs 50% more than the employees salary. Don't feel too bad asking significantly more, after all you are not getting any equity which sounds like your main motivation.

That sort of rule of thumb is going to be most accurate for average salaries, because large amounts of the non-salary costs are relatively fixed (e.g. health insurance costs the same amount whether you earn $50K or $200K annually). As salary goes up, so does its share of total compensation.

Full time positions are dealt with using payrolling companies or SPVs as daughter companies under the mothership, not by independent contractors (with all of the associated risks) and a reduced rate.

You are making a lot of excuses for this company in this thread.

Make sure you factor in extra taxes, in addition to the premium for being a contractor (that on its own should be at least 20%)

And the risk of being canned overnight, of receiving no severance pay, on being unable to collect on your bills in case things end up going South, not being paid when you get ill and so on. 50% is more like it.

Contractors charge more than employees for a reason.

Also understand that if the company comes under heat, the VP has "protected" him/herself by trying to reconcile it.

Would recommend LLC for a sole-founder, beginning startup. (LLC will _help_ protect your personal liability and being sued directly as an individual).

Corporations are needed/good when/if you get investors, and need board members, and stock options, etc.

(Not legal advice, take with a grain of salt).

Sounds like a nightmare if you ever have to go under SOC2.

As a startup with 2 engineers, yes, we use Auth0 and love that it handles everything for us at the moment.

Especially since we have to handle b2b clients who have their own SSO, etc.

Are you on their startup plan that allows you unlimited "Enterprise Connections"?

I'd be very careful with how their pricing impacts your business as you increase your B2B clients with Enterprise Connections.

I'm honestly not trying to pitch you on anything, but when you outsource your auth* to a provider, you must consider the long term costs based on your business model and theirs.

Do you have an exit plan?

Gotta have a good exit plan. I originally used Mozilla's authentication system, which I can't remember the name of, but they got rid of it.

Mozilla Persona, for anyone curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Persona

I LOVED that. Persona was a profoundly disappointing product cancellation.

Agreed.

We use auth0 at work and I've thought about it. With time given most users are SSO based, it's probably doable but annoyingly so over a month to move to another service. Not that we would want to.

Outsourcing auth is acceptable for saas customers. For consumer apps it's probably not a good idea, pricing models typically don't seem aligned in your favor for that.

The only thing that would be hard to migrate is if you store passwords in Auth0 - you would have to reset everyone's password no?

I once did a migration of an auth system by having the new system attempt an auth against the old system if there was no password hash saved in the new one. If it succeeded, it hashed the password and saved it. Seamless for users.

Obviously the old system isn't going to stick around forever, but you can get a good chunk of the passwords migrated this way.