> the upside will be low unless you join very early stage and get decent amount of equity or join as a founding engineer or the company you join becomes valued

> the upside will be low unless you join very early stage and get decent amount of equity or join as a founding engineer or the company you join becomes valued at 10s of billions which is of course rare otherwise there is very little upside. Startups often have very, very mission critical technical problems. The first 20 engineers will be solving some really important technical problems. And they'll need high speed & high quality, since what they do will probably directly manifest in the ole bank account. Even outside of engineering. A rule of thumb running a startup is you should overpay for your first 30 employees. Get smart people who are future leadership candidates. If/when you expand to a 500 person company. Out of those 30, chances are quite a few will manage upwards of 30 people as their reports and child reports. I'm sure there's a million different variations on this story. By no means is it universal. But the "early employees are solving life or death business problems, and will transition to being leaders and force multipliers of large numbers of new hires" definitely happens.