Ask HN: What % of equity should a CTO get?
Short version: I've been managing everything technical for my friend's startup, and was asked to join as a CTO, in exchange for equity. What % should I ask for?
Long version: this startup is run by my very good friend. He is an amateur coder, and developed the code base himself part time over a few years. When he was ready to invest $ to make the site grow, he brought me on board on a consulting basis. I found, hired & currently manage a small team to work on the site, and he pays for the budget. Before I came on board, the code base was pretty terrible: all the development was being done in real-time on production server, never any testing, full of bugs, etc. When I came in, I did stuff like introduce version control, create a staging server, code/schema refactoring, automated testing suite, automated builds, bug/issue tracking, etc. I also manage the team itself, and we regularly have informal meetings where we talk about high-level stuff for the site's direction - you get the idea.
Right now, I put in about 10-15 hours of work a week, out of which I bill for about 5, using a heavily discounted rate (about 1/3 of what I bill others), because it's my very good friend. Before I came on board, the site was developing slowly, but since then it's been growing at a very good organic pace. It is making some money already - not much, about $200 per month, and it has about 1000 daily users. It's not profitable by a long shot (obviously a dev team of 4-5 people costs a lot more), but I believe it has the potential to be in the future.
I want to offer that I don't take any $ myself, contribute about 15 hours a week and take a %. My friend (who is the only owner with 100% equity, btw) have a great relationship, and he actually brought up bringing me in as a CTO himself, but all talks about money are uncomfortable (for me), especially with friends, so I wanted to ask here - in this situation, what's a fair % to ask? Some examples with references would be ideal. Or some kind of a formula that makes sense to calculate it.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!!