Comment by freddie_mercury

> If you look at the YC startups graduating every year, maybe 1 will ever generate $20mm for an early employee

YCombinator -- like all other VCs -- has the data trivially available to show actual compensation of early employees across entire classes of startups and not just cherry-picked best cases. After all, they have the cap tables and the exit dollar figures and how long it took to reach those exits and how many never exited. They probably show that stuff under NDAs to their LPs.

Just not to engineers.

Since YC, like every other VC, has never bothered to publish that kind of data I have to assume it doesn't support their boosterism case for working for a startup.