The only companies whose options are worth 0 (zero) in your example are Gilt and Fab. Evernote and Foursquare are still around - your options are worth less th

The only companies whose options are worth 0 (zero) in your example are Gilt and Fab. Evernote and Foursquare are still around - your options are worth less than their private valuations if you joined 4 years ago, but they are not worth 0, even after dilution. Foursquare is still a $650M company. And only in some twisted world is Dropbox not a success. They're a friggin multi-billion dollar company even if they aren't a 50 billion dollar company (the horror). I also didn't say you're going to have a 100% stock option hit rate for companies that are pre-IPO. You are still taking on risk. But your hit rate is going to be a lot higher. It's also rather telling that these are among the worst examples of pre-IPO tech companies you can think of.