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“You people in tech are crazy. I pay my employees handsomely in cash and I keep all of the equity for myself.” Ha, yeah, I'll bet! It's certainly not easy or

“You people in tech are crazy. I pay my employees handsomely in cash and I keep all of the equity for myself.” Ha, yeah, I'll bet! It's certainly not easy or risk free to deal with equity, but to me, some kind of stake in the company is the only morally justifiable way - if people help to build the business, they should share in the success, and even generous salary will never reflect that - you'll never get rich on a salary.

alien_at_work 9y ago
> you'll never get rich on a salary. Actually, if you get a nice salary and live below it, you can take the extra money and invest in an index fund. That will get you rich much, much faster than chasing lotto tickets. Especially since startups usually have salaries so awful you can't possible do a start up and invest in sensible investments.
- jacknews 9y ago
  In which case you're really getting rich off ownership of companies in the index.
  - alien_at_work 9y ago
    My point is more that investing in a company is a bad investment strategy. There are no fund managers with such a strategy. Any fundamentals strategy will rely on diversification. And a retail trader like us can't diversify cheaper than with an index fund/ETF. Having that single company investment also be the company you work for... and taking a lower salary to be able to make this awful bet... well, you deserve to lose big for behaving so financially irrational.
sidlls 9y ago
Depends on the salary and how it's invested.
icedchai 9y ago
You can get pretty rich on salary (say, 95th+ percentile net worth), it just requires: 1) a lot of time, like 20+ years, 2) living below your means, 3) investing consistently, based on savings from the previous, 4) don't screw up (much.) one bad investment decision or a nasty divorce can derail all of this. If everyone could do it, we'd have a lot more millionaire-next-door types.

alien_at_work 9y ago

> you'll never get rich on a salary. Actually, if you get a nice salary and live below it, you can take the extra money and invest in an index fund. That will get you rich much, much faster than chasing lotto tickets. Especially since startups usually have salaries so awful you can't possible do a start up and invest in sensible investments.

jacknews 9y ago
In which case you're really getting rich off ownership of companies in the index.
- alien_at_work 9y ago
  My point is more that investing in a company is a bad investment strategy. There are no fund managers with such a strategy. Any fundamentals strategy will rely on diversification. And a retail trader like us can't diversify cheaper than with an index fund/ETF. Having that single company investment also be the company you work for... and taking a lower salary to be able to make this awful bet... well, you deserve to lose big for behaving so financially irrational.

sidlls 9y ago

Depends on the salary and how it's invested.

icedchai 9y ago

You can get pretty rich on salary (say, 95th+ percentile net worth), it just requires: 1) a lot of time, like 20+ years, 2) living below your means, 3) investing consistently, based on savings from the previous, 4) don't screw up (much.) one bad investment decision or a nasty divorce can derail all of this. If everyone could do it, we'd have a lot more millionaire-next-door types.