I have done it on small contracts as well, granted we are talking about a sizable start-up in this thread, but never the less many first employees are in a position to renegotiate the options; most start-ups are much smaller at the time these contracts are written, even the company we are talking about in this thread was probably much smaller when most of these "big award to get them in the door" contracts where written. Many of those contracts may have been written when their where less than 20 people at the company. In those situations, contracts are very much negotiable. The second start-up I did I walked into a functional and profitable but small company, and I negotiated my options give the experience I had before. I was not at that time negotiating from the perspective of being the CTO but first technical employee.