Pros: - accelerated responsibility, especially early in career - making something new - little bureaucracy - credentials matter less - can be more fun Con

Pros: - accelerated responsibility, especially early in career - making something new - little bureaucracy - credentials matter less - can be more fun Cons: - typically inexperienced, inept management - longer hours, higher instability, and lower comp even if the startup pays off. Not quite the worst of all worlds but it's getting there. - lack of transparency about cap table and what options are worth. 90% of my colleagues don’t even know about liquidation preferences. We expect early employees to make investor-level decisions with employee-level information - exits are rare or perpetually delayed. even acquisitions may mean nothing if you aren’t a good fit at the acquiring bigco and are let go before vesting (and if you were a fit, why were you at a startup?) - chaos, stress - typically hostile environment for URMs, monthly HR disasters - distorting effects of investor prejudices, expectations - SFBA-centricity; locks out the vast majority of founders and potential employees, and very high costs for early startup employees You asked for solutions but I doubt many of these are easily fixable. Maybe we have to accept that startups just aren't a rational career path to maximize wealth. And especially for Americans, it's incredibly risky to try a startup, unless you come from a very privileged background. The fact that startups are chaotic and run by inexperienced people seems to be a given. Unless you go to a "studio" model where you have a stable team of professionals spinning out startup-like projects all the time. Some people are trying that but IDK if it's ever worked. Transparency about how funding and options work would be trivial to solve. But the founders, board, and investors all have the incentive to keep it hard to understand. But maybe YC could set new norms here, somehow. It might help if YC's alumni network included more URMs. I know you're trying to fix that. And maybe this is harder but at least at the startups I've worked at, there's been a lot of wasted effort simply in order to satisfy what various investors want this month. But I've never worked for a YC company so maybe it's better there. One possible mitigating factor to all of the above would be for the whole startup ecosystem to be more remote-friendly. The compensation starts to make sense if you have nationalized healthcare and don't have to pay SFBA rent and aren't in the running for other SFBA jobs anyway.