Comment by moomoo11
8 days ago
What exactly do you mean?
The only people who make “actual” money at the average startups that exit (acquired or scrapped to PE) are founders, maybe the first 5 hires.
I’ve worked at only one startup. We IPO’d. I did pretty good and I joined a unicorn at like series B. Enough to go a decade figuring out what I want to work on next.
Most of my other friends went to work at other startups. Most of them went bust and they made nothing but their base salary (and a couple of them got screwed on that too).
So unless someone’s working at an actual unicorn like I was it’s really no guarantee.
FWIW I made 8x on my latest shares, and multiples on that on earliest. Some people I know who had been there a few years more than me walked away with many more Ms which ain’t bad for 6-8 years of work.
But that is SUPER lucky. It has sort of ruined my outlook too because I have no interest making 250k base + 200k RSUs, and I have zero interest in most of these current startups that I have a good hunch will not work out. And 400k isn’t that meaningful anymore, I’d rather live off interest or work as a barista if my own startup doesn’t work out.
Most bay area startups pay between 250-350k (not including equity) for senior roles. I know because these were offers I was getting a few months ago. A liquidity event is not required to make substantially more than the average “main st.” dev.
The chance at making FU money is what would be worth it.
It doesn't sound too appealing if its 40-50% more total comp and 100% more work/stress and less time for myself plus random things like losing funding or startup goes bust and can't make payroll, etc.
These are mutually exclusive states, actually.
The "chance at making FU money" and "100% more work/stress" and "losing funding or... goes bust and can't make payroll", that's stuff that happens at startups that are paying _below_ the VC-backed market rate.
Once a company gets money to be paying employees in the third hump of the trimodal distribution of SWE pay, those "exciting" parts are long gone. You're no longer in the running to receive a hilarious amount of money should everything 10-100x, and you're no longer worried about going bust and not making payroll.
Even a pre-series A startup I worked at saw the writing on the wall with 5 months of runway left and switched from trying to get funded to finding an M&A deal. At the very least you can get the team acquired by someone in the expansion phase and get the rare chance to interview as a group and compare notes and have an exec try and negotiate your salary _up_ for once.
By the time a startup is paying VC-backed market rate, the level of stress you have just comes from the usual suspects: management, culture toxicity, etc. some of that you can absorb, some might prompt you to find a new job, just like normal.
There's still a level of "hoo-rah, we're a startup" present of course, but I just consider this a bad attempt to keep the magic of when the company and products were small alive. I let it affect me none.