Comment by thecleaner
6 years ago
The main question is to ask what can you make out of it as an employee assuming the worst. I know full well that there are several great people working in tech as founders. I also believe that ambitious people who really think they are fantastic at delivering products can and should try the testy waters of startups knowing full well what the true market value is of the skillset that they are building. I would never ever join a startup where your market value keeps degrading. Yet many people join startups as employees with mostly worthless stock and continue to do meaningless work that doesn't help increase their market value because they are sold the Kool Aid of "belief in product" and "changing the world" or whatever so hard. As an employee, it is important to stay mindful of your market value and where it is headed.
Yeah this definitely makes sense. I think the startup work you do should build your personal portfolio. Open source (like with an actual open source license like MIT and no weird edge cases) work helps a ton too. I think also being paid in actual cash is actually pretty good and you don't have to make weird money bets.