[indigochill]

> And if you're going to cite FAANG salaries and recent stock performance, then to be fair you need to compare it (also utilizing hindsight) to the fastest-growing startups with the best stock performance.

I'm not sure this is the case, since if you made an employment decision, say, 1 year ago (or whatever), FAANG was a known quantity back then, too.

You wouldn't know this year's FAANG performance, but you could arrive at reasonable-ish expectations based on previous years' performance, whereas a startup that was just getting off the ground at the time would be a total unknown even if it managed to make everybody rich in this past year.

As is common knowledge, though, the startups that make everyone rich (let's ignore the moderately successful ones for the moment because we're talking about taking reduced pay in the hope of future stock performance) are the unicorns, so statistically you should not be expecting that yours will (particularly if you're an employee who doesn't have the business-level decision-making power to significantly impact that probability).

[unishark]

You mean at the beginning of a pandemic and a series of antitrust investigations, with stocks widely considered to be at extremes relative to fundamentals in tech history?

Looking at some price curve and trusting it because of a trend in hindsight is just bad logic and dangerous investing. Those curves change quickly and unexpectedly, crashing right at the time when the most people become bullish believers due to being wrong so often otherwise. You can only trust fundamental reasons for investing, and those are way out of whack currently. I see the same story again every ten years and we are overdue.

[indigochill]

This isn't really conflicting with my observation that they're a known quantity, though. You could still look and say "Gee, this company has been behaving like a monopoly for years and their stock is overvalued - they're probably going to face setbacks soon, so I probably shouldn't take their stock options at face value".

My point isn't that the curves will stay steady or increase, but that you have historical data on them to draw an informed conclusion, bullish or bearish, which just isn't the case with startups.