What are you trying to achieve by being an employee at startups? Is there an alternative strategy for achieving this goal? e.g. if the goal is "save a bunch o

What are you trying to achieve by being an employee at startups? Is there an alternative strategy for achieving this goal? e.g. if the goal is "save a bunch of money and retire to do $whatever_youd_prefer_to_do"... > At a big company, we have a career's worth of income in six years with high probability once you get your foot in the door. This isn't quite as good as the claim that you'll be able to do that in three or four years at a startup, but the risk at a big company is very low once you land the job. In startup land, we have a lottery ticket that appears to have something like a 0.5% chance of paying off for very early employees. Startups might have had a substantially better expected value when Paul wrote about this in 2004, but big company compensation has increased much faster than compensation at the median startup. We're currently in the best job market the world has ever seen for programmers. That's likely to change at some point. The relative returns on going the startup route will probably look a lot better once things change, but for now, saving up some cash while big companies hand it out like candy doesn't seem like a bad idea. [1] [1] -- https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/ https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/ Strategically, it's not great to end up in a position of having to pick winners, particularly when there's lots of idiosyncratic risk --- it'd be better to be able to invest in a diversified portfolio of reasonable looking bets. you can't do this as an employee of startups --- startups typically want you to work at least 5 days per week, and pay you for at most 5, so its a bit hard to diversify. you can diversify your capital as an investor, if not your time. also, investing in things that arent your day job reduces the correlation between your main source of revenue and your assets (less risk of both getting wiped out due to a single event like your employer going bust).