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If (big if) you can choose the next Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase etc. and become one of the first 20 employees, your payoff is going to be far greater than

If (big if) you can choose the next Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase etc. and become one of the first 20 employees, your payoff is going to be far greater than if you're the founder of an average YC startup. There's also the closer-knit network than at a huge company like Google & the opportunity to learn several times more than you would at a big company. Definitely not for everyone and you will be paid less off the bat. But if you think about the course of your career, working at a startup(s) for a few years is probably a good way to lengthen the upper tail of your future potential wealth distribution with relatively limited downside risk.

jiveturkey 8y ago
> If (big if) you can choose the next Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase etc. and become one of the first 20 employees, Completely irrelevant. As one of the first 20, you have exactly zero idea if it's going to be the next Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase, etc. Your chances of landing at a company like this as a first 20 are perhaps .0001%, and if you did land there, you won't know it was a success for 5-10 years afterwards. And as a person straight out of school, you are not getting key-hire level of equity in your offer package. You'll get an amount that would equalize the total comp were you to go to a bigco, IF the startup sees modest success. Big payoff is not the reason to go to a startup. As one of the parents said, work environment is the reason. IMHO anyone out of school should go to a startup, not a bigco. For the work environment.