[iEchoic]

Making less money isn't really the risky part about founding a startup. The risky part is missing out on years of other life experiences, stressing (or losing) your closest personal relationships, failing and feeling personally responsible for disappointing everyone you convinced to believe in you, and developing an anxiety disorder (or worse) from chronic long-term stress.

Author's suggestion that they could have taken a "similar level of risk" as an early employee by taking secondaries as a founder is way off, IME.

[jmward01]

Having been employee #10 a couple times now, there is a lot of that even when you aren't a founder. It would be nice if the 'de-risk your life' stuff this article describes for founders was also available for early employees.

[toomuchtodo]

Work a high salary job and buy lottery tickets or 0DTE options instead. Half joking. Look at the success rate of outlier comp through liquidity as an early startup employee. If professional stock pickers can’t pick better than index funds, what makes you think you can do better picking startups, spending non renewable time, working for years vesting common shares that you might get liquidity for eventually, assuming they have any positive value.

If you want to get wealthy, there are more efficient, less effort ways. If you want to suffer with low chances of success based on all available data, well, help yourself to the firehose of startup jobs.

[beambot]

Perfectly illustrated by this statement:

> I have been an early or first engineer at five different companies and have had three liquidity events in a 9-year career.

A "big" success is a 10+ year journey. For an early employee, it is perfectly acceptable to give a few weeks' notice and move on to the next lotto ticket. This doesn't work for a key founder-exec -- they're likely going to commit to a decade working on one big problem, and investors want to incentivize them to shoot for the moon & stick with it for the long haul.

It's definitively not the same for an early employee.

[AnarchismIsCool]

Having been a key early employee at a failed startup, horseshit.

The employees bear the burden too, if they're working their asses off at an early stage startup they believe in the cause just as much. Viewing founders as somehow magically special is a symptom of the broader misguided hero worship the US has right now.

[bps4484]

I'm sorry this isn't true. Your name wasn't on the line when you took the investment, and the OP pointed out with his "5 startups in 10 years" line, it's very easy for early employees to walk away. That isn't as available to founders. There is much more burden (reputational, financial, emotional) on the founders.

I've been a founder, and I've been a key early employee. It is very different.