[mavelikara]

> you can't really tell for sure a company is going to become a massive unicorn often until very close to the point it does.

I don't contest this point.

> I've worked at companies that raised many millions of $s and seemed very promising and a few years later went out of business.

The only narrative I contest with my anecdata is drawing a universal truth from this experience of yours.

As a sibling comment said:

> Salt of the Earth folk love to share their stories of financial misery, but generally keep quiet about their embarrassment of riches.

[ido]

I think it's the other way around - we comparatively hear a lot more about the successes than the failures. For every unicorn that made 400 people millionaires there are probably >1000 startups that either went out of business, never had a liquidation event, or never at the scale that rank and file employers got anything significant.

Obviously not literally "nobody", someone at some point joins google/microsoft/facebook/amazon/etc at an early stage and exists a millionaire many times over. Just like every week somebody wins the lottery. It's just not as likely to happen to you personally as the people selling you on joining their early startup would like you to believe.

[mavelikara]

> I think it's the other way around - we comparatively hear a lot more about the successes than the failures

Not here on HN.

I was prompted to post on this thread after reading comment after comment about failures.