Comment by mmmBacon

I worked at 4 startups in my youth. All were formed at the tail end of the dot com crash. Of the 4, 2 outright failed and were totally miserable places to work. At one I even had to work for minimum wage until they realized they violated our exempt status. Of the other 2, one was acquired for peanuts. I got a check for $1200. The last company went public. They had had huge funding (almost $500M) and had had several down rounds. Due to this, management was extremely miserly with stock. My stock was briefly worth $250k until the lockout expired and quickly sank to $120k and got as low as $45k. Looking back on it, I totally wasted my time there.

The pay wasn’t the worst of it, I encountered many tyrants who made things even worse.

Now as an older person I have many business ideas but I am unable to take the risk due to having to support a family. I need to make a certain income to cover expenses. The only way I would join a startup is as a founder and at that I’d have to be able to pay myself enough to keep things going for my family.