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"In the not-so-distant past, start ups were pretty much the only avenue to secure a multiple-million dollar personal liquidity event" I'm actually not sure this is true, and wondering if this was reporting bias. When a startup exits for a billion and all the employees get rich, you hear about it on the news, and you can do the equity calculation yourself based on public funding round press releases. When a big company quietly gives a multi-million-$ comp package to a valued employee, they have zero incentive to share that news with the rest of the world. My wife grew up in Silicon Valley, and somehow all of her friend's parents have large real estate holdings. These were people active in the 70s-90s, big company employees, no exits. But there was one guy who had a beautiful house in the Saratoga foothills with an artificial waterfall between his two swimming pools; "Oh, his dad was a rainmaker at Intel." Or another friend of the family who had made some key inventions at HP, and retired early. Or the innkeeper we met in Alaska who had simply worked big companies in Silicon Valley, no exits, saved his money, but then when he turned 40 he bought a sailboat, sailed around the world with his family, then when he reached Alaska bought 2 old warehouses and converted them into a B&B. |