Just as a quick aside of the prestige thing. It is a lot easier to get "prestige" by being a founder of a barely successful startup than it would be to be an e

Just as a quick aside of the prestige thing. It is a lot easier to get "prestige" by being a founder of a barely successful startup than it would be to be an early employee of an extremely successful one. The whole startup ecosystem is very friendly to founders in this respect. And when it comes to recruiting, you are much better off getting a job at a large prestigious company like Google, Facebook, Amazon than you would be at a random startup. The quality of engineering at a random startup, even YC startups, is extremely low when compared to large prestigious companies. This is due to the fact that the engineering talent at startups is generally below that of employees at (Google|Facebok|Amazon|etc), and startups are incentivized to ship stuff quickly and not necessarily work on engineering quality software. If your goal is to found a startup, then maybe you are better off working at another startup to pick up a more diverse set of skills. But if your goal is to get hired as an engineer, a big prestigious company is way way better than a random startup to have on your resume.