Comment by matt_s
7 days ago
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.