Fair enough. Your points are correct, and for this reason I'd advocate not working at a personal loss for more than 6 months, and only for equity (with the cave

Fair enough. Your points are correct, and for this reason I'd advocate not working at a personal loss for more than 6 months, and only for equity (with the caveat not to put money or time into a business that you can't afford to lose). I'm not advocating working in startups to the detriment of all else, but I think it's worth doing when young, if you'll learn a lot by doing so. That said, if my current project were to fail, I'd probably use the experience to get into grad school or a place like Google (on better terms than I'd be able to get without the experience, I hope).