Did you get the cash and options the wrong way round in your example ($100k + 5000 options / $110k + 3000 options)? That bit confused me for a while. Or maybe I'm missing something about how they work!
- $110k + 5k options, with 5M shares outstanding, at a strike price of $1 / share.
- $100k + 3k options, with 1M shares outstanding, at a strike price of $0.01 / share
Both are realistic scenarios for an early-stage startup. The 3k options in the second deal are worth much more than the 5k options in the first deal, on paper. (This is without even brining in valuation in question.)
A call option on a share of Google with a strike price of $50 is worth a heck of a lot more than a call option on "name any startup" with a strike price of a tenth of a penny.
There are, naturally, cash flow implications to this.
As an employee, you just don't know. So value them at zero. Or, if you want to be fancy, epsilon. And take the cash.