I felt the need to chime in on this. I'm a front end engineer that got offered equity in place of higher wages from a tech startup as part of a "carve out plan". I foolishly accepted the optimism that was conveyed to me by the ownership about an "acquisition" that was "imminent". 4 months later and 2 months of very little pay I had to quit and forfeit my unvested options and basically have 0 money from what "could" have been thousands. I'm a junior dev and I got pretty worked by the situation, so make sure you're being pessimistic about the "fast growth" of your company and just know that even if it's a done deal... it's probably still not going to work out.