What the author misses is that it doesn't really matter what your seed valuation is because the equity of the seed investors gets super diluted by future rounds anyway. Once you've raised a series C the difference in equity for the founders is probably .2%.
Unless you exit before your Series A, which seems to be fairly common for YC companies: Reddit, Clickpass, Auctomatic come to mind... 6% at that early a stage might still be pretty high.
If you exit before your Series A, you're probably pretty happy anyway. I dunno about you, but for me I don't care if I get $5M or $4.7M, I'd just be freaking glad to have a few million.
Depends when you believe you are exit is going to be. If it's that you are going to get Series A and then get bought by BigCo for $x million then the initial terms make a big difference.
Well, it's not about absolute percentages but relative. If YC owns, at the start, 6% and the founders 94%, there will still be that roughly 15-1 ratio on cashout. It might be 15% and 1%, rather than 94-6, but it's still the same % less that the founders get.
