[stratigos]

As someone who has worked in startup environments for 20 years, its rather offensive that anyone in 2024 would claim that employees arent taking risks.

In todays salary brackets, one could be comfortably making 220k as a staff dev some huge healthcare/pharma tech firm. One may also feel the job is boring, soulless, and mostly uncomfortable. Then one may choose to work at an exciting AI startup for ~160k, and suddenly find themselves way happier, growing more, and engaged. One just took ~60k worth of risk right there, not to mention that it could be come $0 tomorrow, and one likely now has crap healthcare benefits, given the startup status.

That 60k could be a million dollars in ~15 years if invested wisely.