Thank you for your thorough reply, I really appreciate it.
I can guarantee you I'm no guru at all, I just have a solid understanding of distributed systems on top of average coding skills.
Anyway, I talked to the recruiter and have still been on the defensive side, so he just told me to share with him what's the number I'll need in order to stop this and just say yes, and he'll work with the financial department to see what he can do. I'm going to probably try to get a very mild increase after I hear what the other companies have to say, but it's definitely good to know I can't overly milk the cow
The problem is that, while my current startup is "imaginary" money compared to RSUs, the business is going very strong, we have multi million dollar yearly revenues so I'm not at a point where I consider the options as a huge gamble. It's very likely that they will retain a significant value.
Also notice that RSUs are 300k over 4 years, so effectively 75k a year: is 75k a year "extremely high"? I was under the impression that several employees at google and similar usually double their yearly compensation with RSUs, every year, which means RSU grant = 4*base salary (e.g. 350k a year total comp)
But you don't always need to build a network yourself: in my experience, if you're reasonably bright from the technical point of view, you get paired with a sales account manager who will chase the deals for you, so you just show up, take care of the (relative simple) technical bits, and get your commission. He will do everything else.
This was highly inspirational and I loved it, especially "My customers and I enter into a business transaction as peers. This mutual respect is very important to me".
If I might ask, what kind of enterprise software can generate that much profit from a one-man shop?
As I said in the previous comment, it doesn't really matter, since I want to solve the problem primarily for me by minimizing the costs, so my current problem is adopting the best technology, marketing is orthogonal for the time being.
Thank you very much for your answer! To address your points:
- I'm not doing a preliminary marketing research because, in the worst case, me being the only user of the service would be enough, since it's a real problem that I'm facing
- Pricing: I was totally guessing, it would not be an application the user would have to interact a lot with and there will just be a fairly low amount of background jobs, so I don't see the pricing go much higher than that, but then again, me being the only user of the service and using it as a portfolio project would be already a great goal
I thought about asking here because it's not the first time HN saves my "life" by providing proper perspective on important decisions.