Totally agree. To be honest, I think a 10% offer here would kind of lead to the worst of all worlds: too high for the person to be considered an employee, but too low for the person to really be considered a partner.
I've seen a case where a company was started by a very small, relatively inexperienced team, and then had 2 much more experienced "business people" join later. These 2 business people were actually given "founder" credit and equal equity stakes, because it was clear these folks would be integral to the success of the business (and, indeed, in retrospect, they were, and the business became quite successful). I point this out because it's an example were the addition of some later stage business people does deserve large equity stakes. But given the original commenters history (e.g a previous large exit), it doesn't appear that's the case here, so it doesn't look like he needs a partner to begin with.
