[bhangi]

That is $100k or $25K per year assuming a 4 year vesting schedule. Even assuming that you did not take a pay cut relative to working for a bigger or more established company, it seems a little low reward for the risk involved. Particularly considering that $250M exits have low odds to begin with.

[baudehlo]

It was low risk on my behalf. A full time job taken in 2000 when everyone was letting people go (and I had been out of work for 6 months despite a high profile in the open source community). At a decent pay.

I do think I should have at least negotiated double what I had. But I was young and had no clue about stock and exits etc. Even given that, I did ok considering I was #30.

I still stand by what I said. The numbers are a bit off. A $250m exit is good for most of the early employees. Although of course a $250m exit is extremely rare.

[hga]

A full time job taken in 2000 when everyone was letting people go (and I had been out of work for 6 months despite a high profile in the open source community). At a decent pay.

While I grant that at that point in my life I was older than the startup norm (40 but very productive due to a quarter century's experience and study from the very start of software engineering), there was some serious value to such a job back then. I.e. a lot better than the job I took in semi-desperation at Lucent in 2001 just when it started downsizing from 106,000 to 35,000 employees....

And doing "OK" with equity being employee #30 plus the wonderful resume enhancer of "my product earned over 50% of the company's revenues" is not bad, not bad at all. Being able to tie a serious technical accomplishment to an outsized portion of the company's bottom line speaks to everyone.

[001sky]

This is a personal success story, but...wasn't his point that unicorn employees at this level are going to (be able to) retire...along with the founders...while the next tier down only gets the downpayment on a mortgage...so net/net there is no "game change" unless one is deep in equity or the exit is $1Bn or more. That math is order of magntitude correct, isn't it? I don't see the conflict with what you are saying, you guys are both saying something that is true to some extent.