[rjdagost]

You are correct- probability of success is (in my opinion) the single most important factor when evaluating options. Even if on average employees did well with stock options, the fact of the matter is that the distribution of payouts is very lopsided, not unlike professional athletes or actors. So most start-up employees will get nothing at all for their hard-earned options.

From personal experience, I have worked as an employee at 3 start-ups, and in only one of them did I get any payout at all from my options. And the amount of value I got from that one "success" was trivially small after multiple rounds of dilutive funding (financially, I would have been far better off flipping burgers in lieu of all that overtime). Most of my peers have had similar success rates with start-ups, with a few notable exceptions.