Or simply that one doesn't want to work for a company powered by hopes & dreams while praying for more cash. That early stage stock grant doesn't pay that SF rent.
Even with a raised round, the units that you are denominating the calculation is months. Months of life before your company dies (you can’t raise debt if you can’t raise equity, simplistically).
Depending on your risk appetite, family factors and time in life, it seems perfectly reasonable to signal a better value alignment. He/she could take a (let’s say gigantic) equity stake in a pre-seed entity and low cash, in which case it’s be an extremely expensive employee with no sensitivity around the round or stage of company.
Also, and sorry for belaboring this, but having a round starts the “clock”; personally that pressure to do X or raise Y or sell/IPO is not a feature but a bug, and for others that common goal orientation and team alignment might be really valued.
Seed funding: There is little to no revenue. There is no business model. The startup is trying lots of different things to see what sticks. Most of the work is building prototypes and throwing them away.
Series A: Startup is making money and has a repeatable and scalable business model. They may still be in the red with fixed costs, but every dollar spent on marketing returns more than $1 in income. The work is usually turning those hacky prototypes into stable code.
