I am a software engineer with more than 6 years of experience and currently finishing my degree at UC Berkeley. I joined the team as a full stack and data science engineer. There are four other guys who formed the technology company and had been working on it for a year or two. At the time that I joined, however, it was their belief that their initial idea wasn't making them any money and they will soon significantly change their business model. And so they did. They pivoted to a totally different model that more or less uses the same technology, but for very different reasons. And I was present when we conceived of this new idea.
As of now, the company has $200k in angel fund, but no investor money, no customer, no revenue, and no MVP. We all hope to have all of that in the next four months. It is entirely possible that we don't, but we have reason to believe we might succeed.
When I joined they agreed to eventually pay me equity, but asked me to prove myself first. In the past two months, they have had me work more about 50 hours a week, and paid me $1500 per month.
I don't have the exact numbers, but it seems the three founders own ~95%, and one other marketing intern owns 5% of the company. The intern has been with them for several months more than I have.
Whether or not I am considered a founder is a topic for another question. What I would like to ask is what is a fair percentage of equity that I should expect for this position? It would supposedly be vested over four years.
Background
I am well aware that it is below minimum wage. In the next one or two days we are having the conversation of how much equity I should get and sign the new contract. When I asked for 5% the CEO suggested it was outrageous and I should go on internet and ask what would be a fair cut.
CEO is a recent HAAS MBA grad. The team has two other engineers. One is another Berkeley EECS (computer science). One is a freshman at college, currently working remotely from Nebraska. And recently they brought a Berkeley post-doc with a PhD from a top university in France.
Structure
I believe there are 10 million shares, 5 millions of which are for investors and the startup accelerator which already took 10% equity in exchange for 200k, the other 5 million is what they decided to share amongst each other.