Recently, a startup made me an offer to move to San Francisco from Missouri to work with them. It would be great to get your thoughts and opinions, and to learn from your experience.

I'm nineteen, and I've been programming for seven years. I left high school when I was seventeen to work in the video game industry. Over the last few years, my job has improved my programming skill from "decent" to "pretty competent". I can hold my own, fix bugs that aren't mine, and implement new features and big systems. Some screenshots of my three-year-old demos can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/16941908@N08/ and you can actually play those demos by downloading them from here: http://www.mediafire.com/?b9mvmstg04v

The startup is a group of seriously awesome fellas, and they're extremely smart. It would be fantastic to jump into the startup scene feet-first by joining them.

To keep confidentiality, let's say that I would be anywhere from the 7th to the 10th hire. I was offered a salary of $60,000. As to the stock, I'm extremely new to the terminology, so please bear with me. To avoid saying the exact share numbers, let's pretend that I was offered four shares, vested over four years. The total number of "authorized shares" is then 2391.56, and the total number of "issued shares" is 1916.1. (Again, those numbers are not the actual numbers, but they are accurate in proportion with each other.) There is a double trigger acceleration of 50%, so if they were bought before the shares were fully vested, I'd receive 50% of the rest.

Is that offer reasonable? I'm certainly not counting on them getting bought. I'd simply like to find an interesting project and then really throw myself at it.

Some other questions, if you don't mind: What's it like to live in, or near, San Francisco? What would you do in this situation?

Thanks a lot. I really appreciate your feedback on this.

Shawn