1) get RSUs as soon as you can (if it's not too expensive or seed is a convertible note), so that if you leave you're still an owner in the company.
2) they should just add shares to the company to increase the option pool. I'd consider anything else shady.
It's not a service to humanity to copy the features from a Desktop computer, call it a mobile phone, and claim that this phone is better than a product that was designed to be a phone.
I guarantee you that Google is running it as a negative PR campaign against Facebook. There's no way someone would sabotage their relationship with Facebook when they're paying the bills.
I've had the pleasure... of inviting him to talk at UC Berkeley Linux User Group. He made us change the name of the group to the UC Berkeley GNU/Linux User Group. During dinner, he also likes to stick his hair in the communal food. When I invited him a second time to speak, I avoided him like the plague.
There is a huge risk in opportunity cost to join a startup.
Some founders such as serial entrepreneurs who have proven their value, I could see 100-1000x. However, first-time and inexperienced founders should not get more than 10x their employees given that they providing a lower expectation.
Also priced into it should be the difficulty for you to do it yourself. If the company truly does amplify your value by 1000x, then by all means it is a fantastic deal.
The 0.1% CTR apps relate to mobile games where there is little interaction with the ad is 'Word Seek Social Lite' The 4.5% CTR app relates to generalized RSS readers similar to FMyLife (ex: Softbaum's FMyLife for which we have a rev sharing agreement).
Hope this helps, of course since these are highly profitable, I can't share too much details.
I worked on the Bing AI team (pre-launch), they didn't copy Google. If anything, both search engines copy wikipedia. I believe that this was the click-stream research done by an intern researcher from UBC.
It varies per person. For me, I finished all of my curriculum at Carnegie Mellon, but I will not be completing my degree because I've already gained all the value in my opinion. I think going to school and dropping out was very valuable to me.
Interesting, I tweeted about this last night. Luke Wroblewski had an amazing slideshare on this topic, http://slidesha.re/8A3pI. It has other details such as breaking up the page, alignment, spacing, etc...