[mrnobody_67]

Best risk-reward is VP or SVP level at Series C or D company which gets you options for 1-2% of the company... switch every 18 months to diversify and build a portfolio but negotiate 10 year exercise window on your options when you leave rather than the standard 90 days.

Thousands of execs doing that around Silicon Valley working through Daversa and other executive recruiters (who themselves get $85K-$100K per executive hire).

[kkotak]

I can't upvote this comment enough. The bottomline for risk keen candidates is to get in with founder's equity and risk averse (and experienced, of course) to work with a headhunter to maximize your chances of building wealth.

[BadassFractal]

That's what I hear too these days. The risk/reward sweet spot in the Valley apparently is either VC (collect management fee for a few years, don't have to show results for a while) or what you said, which is being an executive at a 50+ person company that's shown a very strong trajectory of revenue growth.

[naveen99]

Or you could just take a non startup job for higher pay and buy 0.1% of a bunch of late stage startups on EquityZen or Equidate. No need to wait 10 years...

[deanmoriarty]

I would advise against that, I tried to dabble with both platforms, but the markup at which those shares are sold is often incredibly high: common shares of most companies on those platforms are actually sold at prices higher than the preferred (crazy), even if such company just went through a very recent round of funding, meaning that the preferred price is pretty much the very top investors valued the company at.

I honestly don't know who would buy that, the idea I got by doing some basic due diligence on those deals is that who puts them online thinks "let's see if we can attract some dumb money to give us some liquidity at an insane premium". If you sell things at a fair price (e.g. selling common shares at the preferred price * 0.8, depending on the current stage of the company), investors will want to give you liquidity way before your offer on equityzen gets accepted and pollutes the cap table (I speak from direct experience), so what's left on those crowdsourced platforms is many times overpriced garbage.

[naveen99]

well, getting shares as an employee is even worse. You still get common shares, usually with some trade restrictions / lock up period on top of it... The price / premium on the secondary markets is a market price, and in a market that is more efficient than it used to be. Also, the person selling those shares may be an early employee who has many other reasons to sell than screwing the buyer...

[sk5t]

It stands to reason that the premium is based on providing the only opportunity for the would-be investors to buy a piece of the companies at any cost.

[mbesto]

Or just stick it in publicly traded cloud companies: https://www.bvp.com/strategy/cloud-computing/index