I have some experience with almost every part of this spectrum. I worked for a few years for a startup in London that grew from 3 people when I started, to 7 p

I have some experience with almost every part of this spectrum. I worked for a few years for a startup in London that grew from 3 people when I started, to 7 people, and then we got acquired and shipped over to Silicon Valley. Enter the Golden Handcuff phase - definitely my favorite in many ways! We were treated like royalty for a while - given lots of nice benefits and some very interesting and challenging problems to work on, with resources to match (we purchased more than 1000 powerful servers and put them in a huge cage in a colo!). We had nice offices with windows. I had a nice apartment in Palo Alto and a rental car paid for by the company for about a year. After about a year things started to tail off. Our project became less strategically important to the company that had acquired us. We were gradually starved of resources and attention. The perks went away one by one. The transformation was slow, but sure. Eventually even the offices with windows went away, and we were moved to crappy cubes where you couldn't see windows even if you stood on your desk. In the end, the daily routine for everyone on the team was something like a 10am-4pm work day, filled with browsing reddit and playing ping-pong or air hockey. Nobody noticed, or if they did, they no longer cared. Finally my Green Card arrived (after three years). As soon as it did, I quit and joined my next startup (Justin.TV).