I joined a promising startup 18 months ago as the 3rd developer, employee #6, and was promised vast riches in the very near future. I was promised a decent amount of preferred stock options which 'would make me rich', and joined on a salary about £15k less than I could have earned at an established company down the road.
Over the next few months, while the company size went from 6 to 20, and the board were organising the stock options scheme, I was still highly motivated by the favourable options which had yet to be sorted out. A year in, and I was given a very very small fraction of the 11% option pool, which would amount to less than 0.1% of the total shares, which was also subject to dilution. At this point I had all of the speculation previously made by my superiors denied, my importance to the company was downgraded, and I struggled to negotiate a raise in salary that would bring me up to what I'd call an average salary.
This whole procedure was very demoralising, I would have been happy with no options and a decent salary to start with, and all of the speculation of how many billions the company would get acquired for in a years' time would not have bothered me in the slightest. After all, we had no customers, had not launched a product, and I was a key developer. Needless to say I left shortly after to start my own company.
When I left, they offered to 'do something' about the options and give me the raise I wanted, but at that point for me the damage had been done, and I no longer had the ambition to work there. I didn't execute any of the options that had already vested, and used this £300 to start my business.
From my own experience and speaking with a lot of other startup employees in the UK, I believe we care more about the starting salary, and absolutely have to treat options as a bonus. Not only because of the dampened IPO/acquisition outlook in Europe, which i think many startup employees are unaware of, but because startups are a smaller part of our economy. In London for example, 'Tech City' is right next to THE city, where my friends work. You've got guys earning nothing at a startup, working and meeting for drinks, and living with friends who work at banks down the road. I would imagine the US startup scene feels much more like a microcosm, and because we are yet to have that level of separation in culture and circles we socialise in, the difference in lifestyle a salary gives you is a lot more noticeable.
I regret not adapting this mentality from the start, and when we hire our first employee, I will certainly make sure the reason they are taking the job is not the millions they are guaranteed to make in a few years' time.
A simple rule I have for dealing with this sort of situation: I'm either a freelancer or a cofounder.
Strangely enough, saying that one line has changed a conversation from "Hey, wanna work for my startup?" to "Hey, wanna be CTO/cofounder at my startup?"
It performs surprisingly well on iPhone 4, no additional work done for mobile support, the mobile browsers tend to handle CSS3 animations pretty well. Perhaps if the animation was constant (as opposed to an easing transition) it would be less jerky, but then it would be extremely annoying!
Thanks for the feedback! I've made a 'hideAfter' option, so in a serious scenario I'd probably set it to hide after a couple of nudges, so as to draw the user there initially. But for the demo I've set it to infinite so as to annoy all of you as much as possible :-)
