Equity at a startup is a joke these days, even as valuations climb to infinity. When you're an engineer at a VC-funded startup you're competing against VCs for

Equity at a startup is a joke these days, even as valuations climb to infinity. When you're an engineer at a VC-funded startup you're competing against VCs for a piece of a pie. And guess who will walk away with the pie at the end? Will it be the Ruby expert who wrote the backend, or will it be the VC partner who drew up the terms of the funding and the exit? If you join a startup early you'd be very lucky to get 1%, 2% maybe? Ok so then 4 more rounds of funding go by and you're diluted. Then finally after 5 years you sell to Googapplesoft for $200M. Holy shit, payday is here! Wrong. First you're going to pay out to all of the preferred shareholders, some of whom might have special payout clauses because you guys really needed the money. Then you find out your 1% is now 0.3% and you have to wait 6 months to sell any of it. So you busted your ass for 5 years for a few hundred thousand dollars when you could have had a full-benefits, low-stress job at Googleapplesoft in the first place and not put nearly so much at risk. Oh and there's a 90% chance that exit never even happens and all you did was work way below market salary for worthless stock. Oh and that whole time you probably had crap health insurance and minimal 401k matching so your savings aren't looking too good either. The point of the above is not to say "don't work at a startup" because it's obviously a great experience and the right choice for some. And who knows, maybe it will be WhatsApp and you'll be a billionaire and you can come back here and mock me. But if you run the numbers (as the article says), you really shouldn't work at a startup if you're after money.