I think the interesting questions are probably a rangefinding exercise for a) at what age, expressed in employee count, was it pretty obvious that Google would be Google or Facebook would be Facebook, b) at what age, expressed in employee count, did the equity award stop generating lifechanging outcomes for technical employees?
I respectfully submit that the gap between a and b is measured in thousands of employees and/or plural years of calendar time.
There are other companies one could name which looked like they had a better-than-X0% shot of being One Of The Great Ones (TM) which failed (or may fail) to achieve that promise, but it seems a little silly to me to assume that seed stage is necessarily the highest expected value for engineers.
I respectfully submit that the gap between a and b is measured in thousands of employees and/or plural years of calendar time.
There are other companies one could name which looked like they had a better-than-X0% shot of being One Of The Great Ones (TM) which failed (or may fail) to achieve that promise, but it seems a little silly to me to assume that seed stage is necessarily the highest expected value for engineers.