Most founders give away advisor equity based on flattery and guilt, not data, and end up with a cap table full of names who did one intro call two years ago.
Here's the question every founder eventually gets cornered by: how much equity to give an advisor at a startup who just offered to "help out"? The honest answer is that most advisors are worth somewhere between 0.1% and 1%, vested over one to two years, and the exact number depends on stage and how much actual work gets done. But the more useful answer is that you should say no far more often than you say yes, because unvested, undefined advisor grants are one of the quietest ways a cap table gets ruined before Series A even shows up.
Carta, which tracks equity data across tens of thousands of private companies, has found that advisor grants at seed-stage startups typically fall between 0.1% and 0.5%, with the median sitting closer to 0.25% for someone who shows up occasionally and lends their name. That's not a rule you're required to follow, but it's a real benchmark, not a guess, and it should be your starting point in any negotiation. If someone is asking for 2% to "advise," you're not negotiating equity anymore. You're being tested.
In 2015, a group of Silicon Valley lawyers and investors, including Wilson Sonsini partner Yokum Taku, published the Founder/Advisor Standard Template, known as FAST. It did something founders badly needed: it turned a vague, awkward negotiation into a grid. FAST breaks advisors into four tiers, from a startup with no funding to one that's raised a significant round, and crosses that against three levels of involvement, standard, strategic, and expert. A standard advisor at a pre-seed company might land around 0.25%. An expert-level advisor helping a well-funded company close key partnerships might get closer to 1%. Nobody has to invent these numbers from scratch anymore, and the mere existence of FAST has pulled a lot of inflated asks back down to earth.
What FAST also got right is vesting. It recommends a two-year vesting schedule with no cliff, or a very short one, because advisors aren't employees who need a year to prove they'll stick around. They're either useful in month three or they're not. Vestd, a UK equity management platform, publishes similar guidance for founders structuring advisor shares and consistently points to monthly vesting over one to two years as the norm, specifically because it lets a founder walk away cleanly and immediately if the relationship isn't delivering.
Startup Advisor Equity Percentage Should Track Involvement, Not Title
Here's where founders go wrong most often. They anchor the number to the advisor's resume instead of their calendar. A former VP of Sales at a company you admire sounds impressive on a pitch deck. But if that person is doing one 30-minute call a quarter, the fair number is closer to 0.1%, not 0.5%, no matter how good their LinkedIn headline reads. Equity should compensate time and outcomes, not proximity to a brand name.
Break involvement into three real buckets. Someone who takes occasional calls and makes the odd warm intro sits at the low end, 0.1% to 0.25%. Someone who commits to a monthly cadence, reviews your fundraising deck, and opens real doors sits in the middle, 0.25% to 0.5%. Someone acting almost like a part-time operator, sitting in on hiring decisions, helping close a specific enterprise deal, or actively recruiting other advisors, can justify 0.5% to 1%. Past that range you're not looking at an advisor anymore. You're looking at a co-founder conversation you haven't had yet, and that's a different negotiation entirely.
Stage matters just as much as involvement. A pre-seed company with no revenue and no funding has almost nothing but equity to offer, so the percentage runs higher relative to what the advisor actually contributes. A Series B company with real cash flow can and should offer cash retainers or consulting fees instead of equity, or blend the two. If you're a founder who's already raised a priced round, don't hand out 0.5% like it's pre-seed money. It isn't, and your investors will notice the dilution on the next round's cap table.
How to Compensate Startup Advisors Without a Handshake Deal
The single biggest mistake isn't the percentage. It's the absence of paper. A huge number of advisor relationships still get sealed with a verbal agreement and a warm email, no vesting schedule, no defined deliverables, no expiration date. That works fine until the advisor disappears, or worse, until a future investor's lawyer finds an unvested, undocumented 1% sitting on your cap table during diligence and asks you to explain it.
Use a written startup advisor agreement template every time, no exceptions. FAST's version is free and widely used for exactly this reason. At minimum, the document needs four things: the exact percentage or number of shares, a vesting schedule (typically monthly over 24 months), a clear description of what the advisor is actually expected to do, and a termination clause either side can trigger with 30 days' notice. That last piece protects you as much as it protects them. If the relationship goes cold, you want a clean, contractual way to stop the clock rather than an awkward conversation about whether someone technically still "advises" your company.
Frankly, the founders who get this right treat advisor equity the way they'd treat any other hire: with a real agreement, real vesting, and real accountability for the person receiving it. The founders who get burned are the ones who hand out equity because someone senior seemed impressed by the pitch. An advisor who's genuinely valuable will have no problem signing a document that vests their equity over two years based on real contribution. Anyone who balks at that structure was never planning to do much advising in the first place.
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