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by biotechbio 4 hours ago
The obvious other factors in this reframing of equity compensation effectively render it a useless take.

The disparity in expected value calculation is due to assuming you can predict the future after joining a company, which is obviously not true. If you can always tell a company is going to succeed after 1 year of working there, you should leave, as you are clearly destined to be the most successful venture capitalist in history

Not to be overly negative, I think this perspective is somewhat misleading as it lets one rationalize valuing startup equity as anything more than a gamble. Which it is, and always has been. Sometimes gambles work out though.

1 comments

> If you can always tell a company is going to succeed after 1 year of working there, you should leave, as you are clearly destined to be the most successful venture capitalist in history…

Except that "after 1 year of working there" is not how VCs work.

Not true, there is a growing class of "operator" VCs that both fund and help run early stage companies.