[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.