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"For full time specifically, you get equity at a startup. If it IPOs, you make millions if you're one of the first 100-1000 employees." Not really. You

"For full time specifically, you get equity at a startup. If it IPOs, you make millions if you're one of the first 100-1000 employees." Not really. You can make millions if you're a founder... As a regular employee you have more chances to make millions by going to Vegas than with stock options.

speechduh 12y ago
+1. Brother was (fresh out of college) employee 20 at a company that IPO'd > $1 billion, and he got about $150k out of his options from 3 years of work. You have to get lucky to find a company IPOing enough to make you a millionaire.
anton_tarasenko 12y ago
And adjusted for risks, even founders earn slightly more than the wages they would otherwise had in Google. I mean, the whole argument about "bigger money" at startups is more like a myth.
plorkyeran 12y ago
Are there any tech IPOs that made employee #1000 millions? IIRC Facebook only came close even if you ignore the "s", and Google "only" made hundreds of people millionaires.
- mikeyouse 12y ago
  Allegedly, there were over 1,600 Twitter employees with options valued over $1M at IPO: http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-ipo-created-1600-millionaires-2013-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-ipo-created-1600-mill...
serve_yay 12y ago
Believing you'll get rich on options in 2015 or beyond is impressively naïve.
exelius 12y ago
Let's be real; most kids who graduate from a top CS program end up at Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. They will make great money ($100k+) and many will eventually leave to go to a startup. The kids who are going to be successful doing startups with no work experience likely dropped out to join an accelerator before they graduated.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
In my experience the first 1K employees at companies prior to going public have a much higher chance of becoming millionaires as a result of their equity holdings in the company. I'll see if I can find a better source.
- jeremysmyth 12y ago
 How many companies have you experienced? For 1K employees each becoming millionaires, their holdings in the company would need to be worth at least $1B, and if the IPO is 50% of the company, that means the company must be worth at least $2B. That's not a whole lot of companies, and I'm being deliberately conservative in my numbers to give you the benefit of the doubt.
 - ChuckMcM 12y ago
 > How many companies have you experienced? I can't easily quantify the coverage although I've been thinking about it. Of the several hundred people I felt I knew reasonably well at Intel and Sun through the folks I've interacted with at Xerox and Tandem where my wife worked. LinkedIn's mapping function gives me pretty good coverage but the simple sample of is/is-not retired isn't a good signal. But the other part which isn't obvious is that a number of people at Sun (for example) were not millionaires when the company IPO'd but became millionaires as the stock increased in value. In a case which is perhaps unique but not unprecedented, the Sun stock I purchased as part of the employee purchase program (basically 10% of my salary buying stock at 85% of the fair market value every 6 months) over 10 years was worth more than a million dollars in 1999[1] Similarly for folks who "only" had $500K worth of stock when Facebook IPO'd that same stock would be > $1.5M today. The dynamic (which was also well documented in Geoffrey Moore's books) is that companies that make it to an IPO and grow, add value over time and their relative value at a size of <= 1000 employees, to their size at 10,000 employees makes the equity compensation of those 1000 employees a lot more valuable than the later employees got. And to reiterate the data is out there but not well collated. I'll have to do some more digging to figure out if we can quantify this more precisely. [1] Not that I still had it in 1999 but there were folks who did.
mgarfias 12y ago
Amen. I made enough for the down on my house - and I was the 2nd FTE hired.
mx12 12y ago
Speaking as someone who just left a startup to join Google, I was excited in getting really stock options that after vesting could be exercised and sold. It's a long road to go from options to real money. Something I didn't realized before joining a startup. There are many points at which you could be locked in if the company is sold or other events happen.

speechduh 12y ago

+1. Brother was (fresh out of college) employee 20 at a company that IPO'd > $1 billion, and he got about $150k out of his options from 3 years of work. You have to get lucky to find a company IPOing enough to make you a millionaire.

anton_tarasenko 12y ago

And adjusted for risks, even founders earn slightly more than the wages they would otherwise had in Google. I mean, the whole argument about "bigger money" at startups is more like a myth.

plorkyeran 12y ago

Are there any tech IPOs that made employee #1000 millions? IIRC Facebook only came close even if you ignore the "s", and Google "only" made hundreds of people millionaires.

mikeyouse 12y ago
Allegedly, there were over 1,600 Twitter employees with options valued over $1M at IPO: http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-ipo-created-1600-millionaires-2013-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-ipo-created-1600-mill...

serve_yay 12y ago

Believing you'll get rich on options in 2015 or beyond is impressively naïve.

exelius 12y ago

Let's be real; most kids who graduate from a top CS program end up at Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. They will make great money ($100k+) and many will eventually leave to go to a startup. The kids who are going to be successful doing startups with no work experience likely dropped out to join an accelerator before they graduated.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

In my experience the first 1K employees at companies prior to going public have a much higher chance of becoming millionaires as a result of their equity holdings in the company. I'll see if I can find a better source.

jeremysmyth 12y ago
How many companies have you experienced? For 1K employees each becoming millionaires, their holdings in the company would need to be worth at least $1B, and if the IPO is 50% of the company, that means the company must be worth at least $2B. That's not a whole lot of companies, and I'm being deliberately conservative in my numbers to give you the benefit of the doubt.
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
 > How many companies have you experienced? I can't easily quantify the coverage although I've been thinking about it. Of the several hundred people I felt I knew reasonably well at Intel and Sun through the folks I've interacted with at Xerox and Tandem where my wife worked. LinkedIn's mapping function gives me pretty good coverage but the simple sample of is/is-not retired isn't a good signal. But the other part which isn't obvious is that a number of people at Sun (for example) were not millionaires when the company IPO'd but became millionaires as the stock increased in value. In a case which is perhaps unique but not unprecedented, the Sun stock I purchased as part of the employee purchase program (basically 10% of my salary buying stock at 85% of the fair market value every 6 months) over 10 years was worth more than a million dollars in 1999[1] Similarly for folks who "only" had $500K worth of stock when Facebook IPO'd that same stock would be > $1.5M today. The dynamic (which was also well documented in Geoffrey Moore's books) is that companies that make it to an IPO and grow, add value over time and their relative value at a size of <= 1000 employees, to their size at 10,000 employees makes the equity compensation of those 1000 employees a lot more valuable than the later employees got. And to reiterate the data is out there but not well collated. I'll have to do some more digging to figure out if we can quantify this more precisely. [1] Not that I still had it in 1999 but there were folks who did.

mgarfias 12y ago

Amen. I made enough for the down on my house - and I was the 2nd FTE hired.

mx12 12y ago

Speaking as someone who just left a startup to join Google, I was excited in getting really stock options that after vesting could be exercised and sold. It's a long road to go from options to real money. Something I didn't realized before joining a startup. There are many points at which you could be locked in if the company is sold or other events happen.

<i>"For full time specifically, you get equity at a startup. If it IPOs, you make millions if you're one of the first 100-1000 employees."</i> Not really. You

<i>"For full time specifically, you get equity at a startup. If it IPOs, you make millions if you're one of the first 100-1000 employees."</i> Not really. You