Title says it all. I’m currently at 2.5 YOE at big tech making 250k. I love my work life balance and get to work on a lot of different side hustles.Recently, I was offered the founding engineer (#1 employee) at a vertical SAAS company in the food industry. The comp is 160k for 3% equity. The caveat is that I would be the first technical employee, both co founders are non technical.The 2 co founders are genuinely very impressive and seem very smart. One of them has a lot of connections in this space so they have a way to reach customers. The company is pre revenue and pre product and raised 3M seed against 10M.If I came in, I’d essentially be doing the work of a technical co founder with a fraction of the upside.I’m very conflicted on this. One part of me yearns to work in the startup space, I eventually want to start my own and this could be a stepping stone in terms of getting a better network (I feel my network is currently lacking) and if there’s any time in my life where risk is not an issue it would be now.On the other side, I think I’m getting a really bad deal here, I’d build out the entire product and barely get anything in return. The financials only really make sense if this company gets a 100M exit within like 5-6 years, but with how AI is progressing I’m not even sure SAAS will be a viable business model in coming years.Has anyone made these types of decisions before? Looking back are you glad you made that decision? Would you change anything?TLDR; big tech employee conflicted about becoming the first technical employee at a startup with no product and would like advice from others who have gone down this path.