Well there's not one single "the goal" that everyone follows. Some people are genuinely happy to be working for a company they really believe in, some people ar

Well there's not one single "the goal" that everyone follows. Some people are genuinely happy to be working for a company they really believe in, some people are looking for experience to level up their career/rise up the corporate ladder/start their own company in the future. If you're just looking for a payout, going to a bunch of startups for 1 year and then moving on and collecting equity from all of them is an interesting approach. It potentially improves your odds of a > 0 payout compared to going all in on one startup and staying in one place for many years. But I suspect if you're optimizing for a combination of expected value + downside risk, you really can't do better than FAANG or a large unicorn. I suspect a very, very small number of people who have worked at any combination of various startups for the past 5 years will have outperformed someone who worked at Google that whole time. And that's before even taking into account the time value/liquidity of the public stock - even if some of the startups over that time period do go on to be successful, you might have to wait 5+ years after you leave to cash it out.