It's easy for a startup to compete with google on compensation: just be a huge success. If you sell for $10 billion, a typical engineer with 0.1% equity will do

It's easy for a startup to compete with google on compensation: just be a huge success. If you sell for $10 billion, a typical engineer with 0.1% equity will do well. A first employee with 2% equity will do very well indeed. But yeah, on average, it's not going to be as good as Google. Pick your startup carefully.