Even as a company founder, I don't keep half the stuff mentioned on here top of mind, so I doubt that any employee is going to have enough information to comple

Even as a company founder, I don't keep half the stuff mentioned on here top of mind, so I doubt that any employee is going to have enough information to complete it correctly. e.g. to model what you "would have made" if you'd joined Uber at X stage, you'd have to know the pre-money valuation of each funding round they received, along with the investors' liquidation preferences etc and who knows, they may take on even more funding before going public, which would mean your shares would get diluted even further. Overall, if anything, this just serves to illustrate all the complexities involved in trying to model how much a startup's equity offer is actually "worth" in the long-run and that trying to do calculations to model it against an offer at a big company is totally the wrong way to go about it. It just validates what Mark Suster says here: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/04/is-it-time-for-you-to-earn-or-to-learn/ http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/04/is-it-time-for... don't join a startup because you could potentially make millions of $. Join if you want to learn; any money you make would be if you got really lucky and is a nice side bonus.