> in retrospect if I had held on to my stock instead of selling when it vested I could be set for life. Or maybe not: the stock could have tanked for a zillion

> in retrospect if I had held on to my stock instead of selling when it vested I could be set for life. Or maybe not: the stock could have tanked for a zillion reasons. But hindsight is 20/20. If I had held to the BTC I mined back when it was still a toy I'd be bathing in money. Let it go. > "Startup" is kind of a loose term Lots of big co aren't strictly startups anymore but have some startup mentality, either carried over from their past or downright imported. The most nefarious ones do it purposely, pressing all the juice out of employees as if they were lemons, managing to entice them to do so voluntarily, and gaslighting them when they start to fail to produce the expected volume of lemonade. But not all are like that, and in fact I did not really find a correlation with size. Find and define both what you want and what you find unacceptable, and watch for red flags during interviews. Don't dismiss the red flags because something else looks rosy.