I got lucky; they had a successful IPO and I made around 150k based on working there 1.5 years. I joined fairly late (employee 400-something) at a startup that

I got lucky; they had a successful IPO and I made around 150k based on working there 1.5 years. I joined fairly late (employee 400-something) at a startup that was very secretive about their finances and customers, but clearly doing well, if you were paying attention: They had taken on a relatively small amount of VC funding when I joined, so just doing the math on the number of high-quality employees and the fact that they were making market-rate salary offers made it obvious that they had been successfully running on their business model for a long time, even though they wouldn't disclose finances or customer numbers to non-employees. And sure enough, they eventually IPO'ed as a company that had been (mostly) profitable for a while.