[onion2k]

Company hitting $100B market cap after listing after listing means the employee’s position is now worth $100-200M. [...] Probably each IPO you see has a few of those.

The biggest tech company IPO of 2020 was Snowflake, and that had a market cap of $75bn at peak. Most IPOs and direct listings ended up with market caps much lower. I strongly suspect there were no early hires walking away with 9 figure payouts in any of them.

[enra]

Airbnb closed at $99b on the first day. Doordash is now $70b. Snowflake is now $80B.

It doesn’t really matter if it’s $100b or $50b. You would still make at least $50m as one of the first employees.

I know multiple _late_ stage employees that walked out with several millions. It’s not hard to believe early employees would walk with 10x or 100x that.

If can believe that angel investing can be worth it, I’m not sure why people don’t people don’t believe startup equity is not worth it. It’s the same thing, but instead of buying preferred share, you buy common shares with discounted price.

Jason Calacanis $25k angel investment in Uber was worth $100m after the ipo. As employee your equity grant would be likely 10x more than that.

Also btw, companies would love not to give out equity. You could sell it to investors at higher price and dilute the founders less as you don’t need option pools.

[gamblor956]

It doesn’t really matter if it’s $100b or $50b. You would still make at least $50m as one of the first employees.

Unfortunately, that hasn't been true for years. VC firms stopped leaving that money on the table and have been taking those gains in the form of liquidation preferences or stock grants before IPOs that dilute employee shares.

Jason Calacanis $25k angel investment in Uber was worth $100m after the ipo. As employee your equity grant would be likely 10x more than that.

This is clearly not true; there was no "Uber Mafia" after its IPO. If anything, Uber employees were complaining about how little they saw of the IPO, on HN and reddit. And that was before Uber's stock price dropped like a sinking rock after its IPO.