[ryandrake]

I question the amount of influence one can actually have on the the trajectory of a start-up, even if you are an early employee. Before I wised up and joined BigUltraMegaCorp, I worked for a number of small companies, and shared offices with brilliant, hard-workers, and we all moved mountains to try to make things work, but at the end of the day, no dice. I'm pretty much convinced at this point that start-up success is almost 100% luck, and you might as well play roulette instead of trying to pick the right one to work for early on.

Hindsight being 20/20, for every "She turned down being employee number 151 at Google to work for Siebel LOL" story, there are 10,000 (maybe 100,000) "I took a chance with Pets.com and they still owe me 6 months of back pay" stories.

[cma]

Pets.com had a successful IPO, seems it could have easily beat out the Seibel career.

[ryandrake]

Possibly bad specific example, although they didn't survive even a year after their IPO. The point remains though. For every start-up success story, there are thousands of failures. Who's smart enough to pick the successes ahead of time AND get a job with one of them?