Ditto! I have been at a startup that was pretty successful and generated a payout for me of about $1M post taxes.
The original grant plus all the refreshers would have originally amounted to ~$8M (I was within the first 3 employees), but joining early means that at each and every single round you'll be massively diluted (20%+, and there are many of those from a seed round up to a series D/E), and this is without counting the liquidation preference (which in my case was a good 1X non-participating) and other stuff (e.g. emitting new shares for the newly hired fancy CEO that will help us sell the company, refreshers will have a higher cost basis, ...).
If you join early, expect your relative slice of the pie to shrink by roughly an order of magnitude. In the best case.
The original grant plus all the refreshers would have originally amounted to ~$8M (I was within the first 3 employees), but joining early means that at each and every single round you'll be massively diluted (20%+, and there are many of those from a seed round up to a series D/E), and this is without counting the liquidation preference (which in my case was a good 1X non-participating) and other stuff (e.g. emitting new shares for the newly hired fancy CEO that will help us sell the company, refreshers will have a higher cost basis, ...).
If you join early, expect your relative slice of the pie to shrink by roughly an order of magnitude. In the best case.