[akkartik]

I tend to think of offers in terms of how long I can live on the savings from a single year. If you make 100k and save 20k, you make 200k and save 120k[1]. It's not 2x but 6x.

[1] I'm not considering taxes and so on, but the basic idea of leverage still applies.

[nostrademons]

That's a fair way of looking at it, but again, you need to compare equivalent lifestyles. If a startup founder lives on $30K/year because they were constrained to that for the 3 years they were growing their startup, you should compare that to an employee also living on $30K/year. In both cases, their expenses are negligible compared to their income. The employee banks about 7 years for every year he works (modulo taxes, which are not insignificant), while the startup founder banks nothing for the first 3 years and then banks 60-70 years in the final year.