| Stripe employee #130 made $5m (after taxes) from 4 years of options? Is there any data to support that? It sounds mistaken, but exponential curves are hard to reason about. 50 x $15m + 100 x $5m = 1.25B post-tax, so probably north of $1.7B pre tax. Stripe had a post-money valuation of $10B+ in March 2021, so that’s around 15% of the company. I guess that’s in the right ballpark. Hmm. Thank you for the concrete numbers. That’s a nice payoff for four years of work, even if you do have to wait ten years for it. Happy to hear the startup reward structure still makes sense in 2023. In that case, it might be a good idea to join one that seems promising. The payoff is rare, but it’s a lot less rare than the lottery: there have been n YC startups, so the odds are around 10 in n. And I think n is something like 2k to 5k. (Edit: yeah, 4k according to Wikipedia.) 1 in 400 chance of $5m is still pretty low odds, though. But you do learn a lot, and you meet a lot of people that have a higher than average chance of being a future founder, so the benefits still seem to make sense. Interesting. |
At least for people who joined a successful one ten years ago.