[toomuchtodo]

I don't think it's exaggerated. Here's someone's experience as an early employee at PagerDuty, and I can find these examples all day long, both on HackerNews and Quora.

"Right, but OP said he was fired before he had options vested. "So he took 2% options at a 50% pay cut, but then got fired and that screwed him out of the 2% options before he could vest. Welcome to the valley." -- bb88

If you're a founder, you'll either fail, do well, or succeed spectacularly. If you're a startup employee, you won't do better (except in the rarest of circumstances) than you would somewhere else. Be a founder or a tech worker somewhere established with market rate pay, but do not be a startup employee (unless you're desperate for experience and literally have no other options).

My opinion and advice would change if the value proposition to startup employees changed substantially, putting them on par with founders.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18064745