For what it's worth, I chose the small startup offer over the name brand offer after graduating from a top school. My advice would be to TAKE THE NAME BRAND OF

For what it's worth, I chose the small startup offer over the name brand offer after graduating from a top school. My advice would be to TAKE THE NAME BRAND OFFER. Jessica's points were not true in my experience. "Yes, startups are very risky, and they often fail. But when they don’t fail, their stock can become quite valuable." The startup I worked for actually was pretty successful by most measures. In fact, I've now worked for two "successful" startups as a relatively early employee -- one acquired for XX M and another for XXX M. When all was said and done, I would have made more had I gone to a company like Google. You will get diluted, the investors will get their liquidation preference, part of the acquisition will go to retention incentives, and whats left over will be a fraction of the numbers you see in the media. Literally, the only way you will make anything comparable to a founder exit is if the company IPOs and becomes Facebook. Also, most big companies give large stock grants. When I graduated, the stock grants Google was giving to recent grads would now be worth well into the 6 figure range. Not life changing money, but comparable to what you would get in a decent sized exit at a startup. I'd also add that joining a company like AirBnb is not the same as joining a startup. I'd imagine the AirBnb experience would have more in common with joining Google than joining Zip-tify-io-ly. "It’s also a form of education. And at a startup, you learn a lot faster about how companies work and how to make a great product than at a big company." NOT-TRUE-AT-ALL. If you go to work at Google, you can still work on a new product. The big difference is that at Google you will be surrounded by experts in their fields. You will learn what it takes to build a scalable product, how to build things in a modular and parallelizable way, solid coding practices, how to work on a team etc. At a startup you "might" learn those things, but you very easily might not. My experience is that a lot startups carry massive technical debt. Their products tend to be hacked together because they didn't have an expert in (python, javascript, databases etc.) when they built the product. So, worse than not learning a lot, you might be learning exactly how not to build a product and spending all your time cleaning up spaghetti code. Plus, at Google, your product might immediately be in the hands of millions of people. The vast majority of startups never even find a product-market fit. Bottom line, in my opinion it makes no sense to join a small startup as an employee from either a financial or career perspective. If I had it to do over again, I would have gone to a more established company with name-recognition out of school and built savings, skills, a social life and connections. After a couple years at one of those companies, you can write your ticket to any role in the industry, including founder of a VC-backed startup. You'll have an insane network, enough savings runway to build your idea and actually have time to enjoy your early 20's social life.