"Startup options aren't so bad"..."adding risk aversion would decrease the offer value by a huge amount" So the author shoots his main premise in the foot by n

"Startup options aren't so bad"..."adding risk aversion would decrease the offer value by a huge amount" So the author shoots his main premise in the foot by not including one aspect of human behavior that we see in just about every worker. Sure, young people with no family are less risk averse than old people with families, but just about anyone seeking a salaried job is risk averse when considering jobs. Risk seeking individuals aren't very common in the standard job market. Ben's articles are usually well informed, especially when it comes to probabilities and decision analysis, but not factoring in indifference curves in an analysis that is already this complicated is a pretty big miss. The bottom line is that working for a startup is a pretty big gamble, and expected values are misleading in terms of how people actually make decisions.