> Financial advisors counsel people all the time not to put their eggs in one basket. One nuanced take that I've found useful: diversify to preserve wealth, bu

> Financial advisors counsel people all the time not to put their eggs in one basket. One nuanced take that I've found useful: diversify to preserve wealth, but concentrate to build it. To be clear, I'm not advocating against the default view that stock options are lottery tickets, because from a pure financial point of view that's close enough to the truth. However, it's important to understand that outlier wealth comes from ownership of businesses, and the whole point of being at an early stage startup (whether as founder or early employee) is to be an agent in the success of an outlier business. There's no way around the fact that this is a fundamentally risky proposition. The odds are always against you—especially given how much one can make in FAANG, it's a particularly difficult time to make any kind of expected-value argument for working at a startup. That said, there will be more outliers in the future. Many people who work on those will see generational wealth far exceeding the rank and file of FAANG. They will have gotten there via a drive to do something new and different, and working together to achieve something that the majority of rational people deemed impossible. Despite future dismissals about luck, or odds, or averages, or reproducibility, noone can take away what they will have accomplished through the sweat of their brows and choices made along the way in the face of massive uncertainty. Ultimately, the best reason to join (or found) a startup is because you really want to try to do a hard thing with a group of people you trust and admire enough to go into the trenches with for the next 2-5 years. It can pay off, but the mentality necessary for success is diametrically opposed to good financial advice.