This. FAANG and adjacent pays so well, it's a better and more guaranteed outcome than startups - for people that have that option. Dan Luu wrote about it over

This. FAANG and adjacent pays so well, it's a better and more guaranteed outcome than startups - for people that have that option. Dan Luu wrote about it over a decade ago: https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/ https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/ The math is not in favor of working at a startup, if you do it, don't do it for the money. People finally wised up to this. Even as the founder, working at a FAANG usually works out better financially and is much less stressful. VC's do all kinds of horrible things to founders, like firing them, forcing them to sell at a price that means they get $0 (VC's get preference usually up to 2x their investment - if the sale price is lower than 2x the investment, founders and employees alike get wiped out.) People are also wising up to this. If you're going to found a company think really hard about joining YC and/or going the VC funded route. I think it'd be a lot more pleasant to found a company worth $10 million after 10 years, and own 100% of it, than to found a company worth $100 million after 10 years and own 10% of it. VC is only really for when you've found real product market fit and your biggest problem every day is meeting the insane demand. Everything is just falling over and you can't scale fast enough and you're leaving piles of money on the floor because you just don't have the resources to serve those customers. Then maybe it becomes a good tradeoff. You definitely don't have that in the beginning, and most companies never experience that. I used to drink the koolaid, I applied to YC multiple times. I'm still trying to start stuff on the side of my day job, but I no longer apply to YC and fully intend to bootstrap a smaller but profitable software business.