[siruncledrew]

IMO you have be lucky in both cases to really strike it rich.

Choosing a startup with this kind of potential is insanely hard to do, and if you get lucky then the explosive growth of immediately becoming wealthy is what redeems it. But the key is choosing the needle in the haystack. It's harder than being an investor. An investor can make 100 bets hoping one works out, but an employee is only deciding on 1 place.

Working at a FAANGM company is a safer chance at hoping to climb the corporate ladder and reach a cushiony role through steady work over time. Essentially someone is hoping to ride a steady incline up from $150k to $300k+. Granted it's not the exciting casino-like feeling that a startup exit provides.

[throw123123123]

I dont think the rewards of the corpo ladder make a lot of sense. An L9 at Google, someone with 15+ YOE and rocking the perf game for over a decade makes less than what any series B to Series E SWE makes.

[lostcolony]

Uh...what? In base maybe, but after bonus and equity you're looking at $1M+ per year even at an L8 - https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...

The average SWE working at a series B to series E startup is nowhere close to that. Even if the company exits successfully, it's after a few more years, further dilutions, and you might, MIGHT walk away with a million or two...which you have to amortize over the years you worked there.

Am I missing something?

[cco]

I'm aware of support agents at startups that are/were pulling down $300-400k/year in total comp in pre-IPO numbers. Presuming a happy path towards IPO, that total comp could end up being more like $600-800k, none of these people are Google L8 caliber but they will make money in that same ballpark.

No idea what engineers were making, but probably much more than 2x a support agent.

[onion2k]

Presuming a happy path towards IPO..

That's a big presumption. There were 407 IPOs in the US in 2020. That's not in tech, but in all industries. If you're pinning your hopes of 50% of your comp coming from an IPO event then you must be very happy with risk.

[cco]

Right, its a risk, but are you aware of FANGs paying $200-300k/year for technical support staff? I'm sure there are some openings, but low six figures in cash and a chance at 3 to 8x at a startup seems quite attractive.

[throw123123123]

An engineer that joins a Series B startup at 500M with 100k/yr equity, and that company gets to 5B valuation, very roughly gets 1M equity yearly. Also potentially tax advantaged.

How many L8's does Google have? 100? The chances to get there are probably resemble or are even worse than startups from Series B to Exit.

[joshuamorton]

You're off by a factor of probably 5-10 (and maybe more) in the number of L8s. It's a 150K employee company, with a dozen or so "S"VPs, and then VPs, and then below that are the directors. And its worth remembering that you're implicitly including stock growth in the startup valuation, but not in the big-co valuation. GOOG is up ~10x in the last 10 years and ~4x in the last 5. The 200K in stock the Google person was getting each year a decade ago is worth 2M per year now. Even the S&P 500 is up 4x in that period.

[throw123123123]

I'd bet that a sr engineer that worked 2001-2005 at google has multiples of a yearly income than someone that is an L8 in 2020.