[garry]

I was employee #10 at Palantir and received and accepted an offer in this ballpark. I'm pretty happy with it at this point. Frankly it was absolutely life changing, both from a learning perspective and a compensation perspective. Of course that's an outlier — but this is why you should treat what company you join the way investors think about investments. Only they get to diversify and your choice is even more important — you only get one shot at any given point.

rgbrgb's point is also well taken. You should be able to swap equity for salary, since for a pre Series A company that's a chunk of coin.

[habosa]

Very true, although Palantir is probably one of the top 10 most valuable and technologically interesting startups of the last 10 years so you made a great choice.

$130k is a lot of money and, like you said, being in the first few employees is a great opportunity for personal development. I just feel like you have to consider the 0.2% to be a lottery ticket because most of the time it will end up being worth nothing or very little.