At a company’s earliest stages, expect to give a senior engineer as much as 1% of a company, the handbook advises, but an experienced business development employee is typically given a .35% cut.

An engineer coming in at the mid-level can expect .45% versus .15% for a junior engineer. A junior biz dev person should expect .05%, which is the same for a junior person coming in as a designer or in marketing.

“After a seed round, you want to have that employee pool at around 10% or 12%, plus or minus,” says James Currier, a four-time founder who is now a managing partner at NFX

building a successful company usually takes a lot longer than four years, and options are about retaining people to build something great. As a result, longer vesting schedules are becoming more commonplace.

Typically, employees have had up to 90 days after leaving a company to exercise their options, which can be costly and come with a large tax bill. Now companies are sometimes extending that period well beyond 90 days so that an employee won’t end up with nothing

Currier, the serial entrepreneur turned venture capitalist, says he typically offered between .1% and .3% of the company to attract an advisor to one of his companies.