IMHO, stay put. At your compensation, it's going to be nearly impossible to join a startup and have the opportunity cost make sense. Do what you're doing for a

IMHO, stay put. At your compensation, it's going to be nearly impossible to join a startup and have the opportunity cost make sense. Do what you're doing for as long as you reasonably want to, or until the comp drops off. Hopefully you're saving, and then you can either be a founder or an investor/advisor once you want to get involved with a startup and have it be better worth your time. >- If I accept a position with 1% equity, the company exit would need to be at least $500M just to match my previous comp. Layer in some assumptions here and I think it needs to be a lot more than that. I think, currently, it's on average 5-7 years between first funding and IPO, with let's say 5 fundraising rounds. [0] Being optimistic and assuming 10% dilution each round, maybe you have 0.6% at IPO time. To cover that 7M of opportunity cost, you need closer to a $1.2B exit. This isn't even factoring the odds of picking a winner that actually exits! Unless you really don't like what you're doing right now, it makes sense to keep that going as long as possible, then exit to the couch and do whatever you want. (Also, someone tell me if I did bad math. I do bad math.) [0]: https://about.crunchbase.com/blog/how-many-rounds-of-funding-do-companies-raise-before-exiting/ https://about.crunchbase.com/blog/how-many-rounds-of-funding...