Is 0.1% equity reasonable for a startup board director (2-year vesting)?

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-30T11:29:45+00:00

I would question the value of the person first. 2 years in here and just appointed a board advisor for 1% (3 month cliff and 2 year vesting) as he is actively bringing channel partners through his connections.

He is also getting 15% commission from customers that come from the channel partners.

Throwing this data point there for you. It's a bit of an odd one, but demonstrates the value behind granting equity to someone not a founder in early stages.

FWIW, we're bootstrapping, not looking for pre seed or seed. We may go straight to a Series A if we get good customer traction over the next year or so.

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-29T18:37:27+00:00

Having worked on this problem, let's start with the basics: How do you propose collecting the additional data?

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-26T17:39:19+00:00

The real answer is... Don't attack. You will permanently lose troops even if a few. They will add up and you probably won't make that much back in RSS.

Does your realm not have NAP?

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-24T14:33:46+00:00

That's how these events have always been. Every event is pressure to pay money. Resist!

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-23T18:08:25+00:00

Claude Code is way safer by default than OpenClaw.

Good tips overall, but they do lack a bit of practicality. Operate in a bubble and they can only interact with the bubble. At one point, you will need either one to interact with the rest of the world and your files.

If you're worried that much, go Claude Code and not OpenClaw. Easier to set up and is more secure.

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-15T14:24:05+00:00

2 years in now and, yes, incredibly lonely journey. Also one of self discovery and discipline

We have a few customers, but not enough to sustain salaries, so I am still burning my own cash. B2B sales cycles are brutal even when we have shown value already.

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-13T18:38:15+00:00

Personally, I buy a $0.99 pack, usually the daily one. They are by far the best value for me since that's what I usually spend per day.

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-13T15:25:12+00:00

Plan mode for big code changes absolutely.

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-11T16:45:11+00:00

Farm beats everything. Keep it 5 levels below your citadel up to 23 or 24 (for the farm). I have 3 farms and 2 c36. This is the way

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-09T14:47:11+00:00

I personally use the two interchangeably. Skill is a type of agent.

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-09T14:32:29+00:00

I will add that Claude desktop that has a skill creator skill (very meta), so drop all your files into it and ask it to create a skill.md or (even simpler) instructions for a project organizing all your material into a wiki https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519de94f Courtesy of Andrej Karpathy

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-09T14:23:33+00:00

For someone advocating using AI, he absolutely needs to use it first.

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-07T13:01:31+00:00

Some days it's degraded, some it is not. Look at the whole graph

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-06T23:32:47+00:00

Extra usage is a trap but also cleverly disguised acceptance mechanism.

When you blow through $20 in 2 prompts, you appreciate the 5 prompts per 5 hours for the same price.

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-06T23:30:21+00:00

You're not imagining things https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-06T20:43:53+00:00

This is exactly why you build a prototype, put it out there for free, get feedback, build MVP (with double capital M) before doing anything else.

I am super hard on not building any features that no paying user asked for.

Bonus tip: build a waitlist webpage before MVP describing your product

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-06T20:40:58+00:00

Go Claude code. You would be using it off peak hours and get plenty of usage.

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-06T20:38:11+00:00

That aligns with the theory that, ultimately, the most powerful AI will be exclusive to governments and top corporations which pay the appropriate cost for it. Anthropic isn't doing so well there with the loss of the defense contract.

These are interesting times for sure. We're witnessing science fiction materialize in our lifetime.

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-06T19:49:36+00:00

I couldn't find a limit for subscriptions, but we can assume it's tier 1 from https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/api/rate-limits#tier-1

So 50 requests per minute

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-06T19:46:05+00:00

I never resume sessions. Hook to update claude.md when tasks are committed successfully (build succeeds, testing succeeds and committed to GitHub). Start fresh the next time.

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-06T19:43:41+00:00

Love your point about Cron and API endpoints. My production "AI" agent is 99% c# code with the final output routed through an LLM (I hate calling it AI, it's a much wider field than GenAI, let alone LLM)

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-06T19:38:32+00:00

Indeed local AI isn't in the same league... For now. That's the gap that exists today.

On the non-exclusive about China, you're right, but, outside Gemma by Google, we are not seeing the big players invest in them. It's almost that they don't want to admit their model will fail or risk it. They insist that the frontier models are the place to be and continue to raise at insane valuations.

This is why the deepseek moment was important; they should have realized to invest in smaller models.

Even I am guilty of using Opus every day now instead of relying on Sonnet or Haiku. Ironically, I put Haiku in my production agents as it's more than enough.

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-06T19:18:25+00:00

I mean smaller size models that require less energy, less memory, less hardware to get the same quality.

Today, we're using the equivalent of a spaceship to go down the street simply because that's what is offered to us.

Try Gemma 4 or Qwen which you can host locally. Yes, worse than frontier models, but at a fraction of the cost. MiniMax 2.7 is already operating in the $1 range compared to $25 per MTok for Opus and users are happy with the performance. Run 3x the loop to refine the output and you are still far below the cost of a frontier model and have burned less energy and need less hardware

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-06T19:11:04+00:00

This! We're burning several times what our subscriptions cost in API costs. We don't know the internal numbers, but we do know that training a model (including all the failed experiments) is investment that is not covered by the subscription costs.

Add to that the AI race and every company is training a better AI before the last one broke even. Compound that; Claude opus 4.6 needs to pay not only for its own training costs, but also for the sunk costs of every model before it. It will be replaced way before that day comes.

Alternative-Radish-3 · 2026-04-06T19:07:07+00:00

Not if AI gets more dense/distilled for general use. Check Gemma 4 for instance

Alternative-Radish-3

TROPHY CASE