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1. 6% of zero is zero. 2. 4 years is a lot of time to spend at a company for a high probability of making 6% of zero. 3. If you're an employee at a startup
by bb88 8y ago
1. 6% of zero is zero.
2. 4 years is a lot of time to spend at a company for a high probability of making 6% of zero.
3. If you're an employee at a startup, you're in the wrong job. You're much better off being a founder.
4. Equity is a way to be paid less and to be fired in the first year if you haven't vested anything.
5. Who are you going to sell your equity shares to? It's not necessarily a free market in the startup world.
6. Big companies aren't just the only type of company to be soulless. Wait till you see a small company try to screw it's employees out of equity.
- gesman 8y ago"...You're much better off being a founder." Or VC investor with preferred shares that will guarantee you get paid first N-times your original investment (before unaware engineers will see a penny).
- sokoloff 8y agoThat’s generally not a choice available to people early in their career in tech. Being a founder is a choice available to them...
- liquidise 8y agoThis is a surprisingly jaded response that flies in the face of my experiences at multiple startups. I concur with assuming equity will be 0. Dilution is real and almost all startups fold. Counting on equity is unwise and dangerous. As for the rest of your commentary, I’d say startups are great because you get a better ability to shape your experience. I’ve now been employee: 21, 7, and 1 at respective startups. While I’ve seen poor management, I’ve not seen evil management. As for opportunities, they are what you make them to be. There is always room for leadership at small startups, for instance. If that is a path the OP cares about, it is an intruiging option. All that said, at 3x the salary google is hard to say no to even over a 1-2 year span.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bb88 8y agoI made a long post, whined a bunch and deleted it. But I do agree with you sentiment about equity. I do believe if VC's really believed that they were making the world a better place, they would insist that employees shared in the wealth that was being created. On one hand, the Valley is an amazing economic engine, on the other, it's an amazing place of inequality where people making $70k can't afford to live there. If that's the future, the Valley needs to do better, rather than insisting that people need to live in houses smaller than shipping containers.
- burlesona 8y agoThis.