[TimTheTinker]

Fully agreed. Posts saying they're "worth $0" are most likely to be accurate if you take the average early-stage startup (most fail).

But as an insider, you have the ability to uniquely gauge whether this is an "average" startup, or one where truly thoughtful, innovative, honest, humble people are working hard for a dream that, from your vantage point, has a good chance of panning out, even modestly.

I will say that your $60k compensation isn't a good sign, though. It signals that the engineers they've hired either (1) are great engineers and they really, really believe in the future of the company, or (2) aren't that great. You can probably gauge which is the case for yourself, but across all low-paying startups, (1) would be a very rare case, and (2) would be far more likely.

[fragmede]

Problem is, all of those can be true, and the startup still fails to find market fit, or traction, or pivot exactly right. Or something happens 3 years down the line that results in the company failing for no internally foreseeable reason.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say, but that road is build with some really solid engineering (it being so hot there and all), and we only really hear about the successful exits which reeks of survivor bias. The well run companies just fade away in our collective consciousness. I can name Uber and Lyft off the top of my head, no problem, but their defunct competitors? I'd have to look them up to name more than... Flywheel, I think it was?