How much equity should a new advisor really get?

This comes up almost every time a founder brings on an operator or industry expert as an advisor, and almost every founder has heard a different number from a different friend. The honest answer: for a standard advisory relationship, most early-stage advisor grants land between 0.1% and 0.5% of fully diluted equity, vesting over one to two years. Anything materially above that should come with a materially bigger commitment than "I'll answer your calls."

The number matters less than the structure. Here's the math founders skip: they anchor on a headline percentage without asking what that percentage is worth relative to what the advisor is actually contributing. An advisor who makes three warm introductions and reviews your deck twice a year is a different grant than an advisor who's opening doors to enterprise customers or sitting in on every board meeting. Tie the grant to the actual time commitment and the specific value you expect, not to a round number a friend mentioned over coffee.

The vesting terms matter more than the percentage. A standard advisor grant should vest monthly over one to two years, with no cliff or a short one (30 to 90 days), and it should include a clean termination provision: if the advisor stops advising, vesting stops. This protects the company from a scenario that happens more often than founders expect, where an advisor is enthusiastic for the first three months, disappears, and still owns a fully vested chunk of the cap table two years later for work they never did.

One thing worth separating out: an advisor who wants to also invest cash in the company is a different transaction from the advisory grant, not an extension of it. If an advisor asks to put money into your current round, that's a straightforward purchase under whatever instrument you're already using (SAFE, note or priced round) and should be documented as such, not folded into the advisor agreement. Keep the two clean and separate. It makes the cap table easier to read later, and it avoids muddying an advisor's incentives (get the company to succeed) with an investor's incentives (protect the investment) inside a single document.

Founders sometimes worry that a smaller number or a vesting schedule will offend a prospective advisor. In practice, an experienced advisor expects both. If someone pushes back hard on standard vesting for an advisory grant, that reaction tells you something about the relationship worth knowing before you formalize it, not after.