[jm20]

There isn’t a single founding engineer at a publicly traded company that regrets their choice to sacrifice salary at a more stable company for 1% of a startup.

Becoming a founding engineer is a wealth-building, passion-for-your-work risk, not a pure salary optimization decision. HN never seems to understand this. If you’re optimizing for stable salary, go for the FAANG position. You’ll be comfortable, but you’ll most likely never be able to fly private, and you’ll have to be OK existing as a cog in a massive machine. Plenty of people are ok with this. These people should not be founding engineers.

[danny_codes]

Being a founding engineer is not wealth-building. Only 10% of startups succeed. Of these successes, only a small fraction (likely less than 1%) will be large enough to compensate for missed salary.

I would categorize it more as an extremely high-risk gamble. Actually your odds would be better taking your $3M in FAANG compensation over the same time period and making a 20:1 bet with a 2% chance of winning in Vegas. Probably double your chances of being able to fly private.