[deanmoriarty]

I would love to hear more about your experience. In my experience, no startup comes close to the pay of a big and healthy tech company.

Specifically, even if you get the startup to match the base salary of the big company (which is almost always not true and comes at a 20-30% discount, but I'm willing to assume that it can be done), the equity that the startup will give you is effectively $0, whereas the public RSU the big company will give you are basically cash-equivalent (if you are really conservative you can adjust them by 20-30%?).

This last point is the major one for me: at least in the Bay Area, senior software engineers are offered equity grants that are effectively the same size of their salary every year, so by going to a startup you are immediately being paid at least half.