You can ask feel free to ask for a pony in a salary negotiation, and in general I bow to no one in advising "ask for more", but that specific ask has the dual unhappy properties of being very awkward for founders to grant and yet not very useful to you the prospective employee. (Even an idealized employee who'd be capable of understanding what it meant.)
"What was your most recent valuation?", "What is the size of my grant relative to the full dilution of the company as of today?", etc, get you more signal with less social awkwardness. I mean, at a minimum, it's more of an imposition than "Give me the salary details for everyone at this company", which is for better or worse radioactive almost everywhere, and in addition to similarly being against the corporate interest also tends to disclose privileged information about folks who wouldn't even be listed in salaries.csv.
P.S. In my n=2 experience as a very small angel investor I am struggling to remember ever seeing the full cap table. I'd have to check my docs to see if I'm allowed to ask for it, but my limited social radar for the Valley suggests that's the sort of thing that would be socially contentious. Founders I invested in were very circumspect about getting explicit permission to be able to quote the fact of the investment publicly, to say nothing of the amount.
P.P.S. Disregard the above if somebody who does this on a more regular basis suggests that you're more in touch with reality than I am. It's possible.
Cap table isn't the same thing as salary. It's the (future, in case of options) ownership of the company.
Cap table transparency would go a long way in making VC-istan honest because the equities in salary tend to be small while those in equity are massive. If engineers in a typical VC-istan startup found out that the non-tech VPs and "product people" working 10-to-4 were making $140k while they make $110k, nothing would happen. That's not enough of a difference to set most people off. If they found out that those people had 1% while they had 0.05%, it'd be epic. (That's why VC-istan hides cap tables. It doesn't want to have to admit that engineers are commodities to it.)
You don't need cap tables to know that the employee equity is small compared to investor equity. It obviously is. Most everyone I talk to knows that. VCs aren't "hiding" it.
If you don't want to work at a company where a pencil-pushing meeting-dwelling financier is going to earn an outsized reward compared to your efforts as a software developer, don't work for VC-funded startups. On the other hand, VC-funded startups tend to work on fun speculative problems, because they're powered by other people's money.
What a "non-tech VP" makes has nothing to do with an engineer's outcome. Obsessing about what other people in the company make is unhealthy.
"What was your most recent valuation?", "What is the size of my grant relative to the full dilution of the company as of today?", etc, get you more signal with less social awkwardness. I mean, at a minimum, it's more of an imposition than "Give me the salary details for everyone at this company", which is for better or worse radioactive almost everywhere, and in addition to similarly being against the corporate interest also tends to disclose privileged information about folks who wouldn't even be listed in salaries.csv.
P.S. In my n=2 experience as a very small angel investor I am struggling to remember ever seeing the full cap table. I'd have to check my docs to see if I'm allowed to ask for it, but my limited social radar for the Valley suggests that's the sort of thing that would be socially contentious. Founders I invested in were very circumspect about getting explicit permission to be able to quote the fact of the investment publicly, to say nothing of the amount.
P.P.S. Disregard the above if somebody who does this on a more regular basis suggests that you're more in touch with reality than I am. It's possible.