Not much of a change. It's still suboptimal from a financial point of view to join an early stage startup: yes, you will be screwed out of the fruits of your la

Not much of a change. It's still suboptimal from a financial point of view to join an early stage startup: yes, you will be screwed out of the fruits of your labor even on the off chance that your company hits a jackpot. There are people much more sophisticated than you or I whose entire job is to figure out how to steal equity from you. To the extent there's been a change, the economics of startups and tech are more precarious nowadays. GOOG and FB both have their business models under significant threat, aside from cyclical concerns. And if a recession happens, both they and companies at all stages will have substantially reduced budgets for compensation. This means fewer jobs and more layoffs. It's also more unclear nowadays what the next unicorn is. You're not going to become a quick multimillionaire by joining Uber or AirBnB at this point--there was awhile a couple years ago where they were a pretty reasonable choice to maximize comp. No such candidates exist nowadays.