[hga]

A full time job taken in 2000 when everyone was letting people go (and I had been out of work for 6 months despite a high profile in the open source community). At a decent pay.

While I grant that at that point in my life I was older than the startup norm (40 but very productive due to a quarter century's experience and study from the very start of software engineering), there was some serious value to such a job back then. I.e. a lot better than the job I took in semi-desperation at Lucent in 2001 just when it started downsizing from 106,000 to 35,000 employees....

And doing "OK" with equity being employee #30 plus the wonderful resume enhancer of "my product earned over 50% of the company's revenues" is not bad, not bad at all. Being able to tie a serious technical accomplishment to an outsized portion of the company's bottom line speaks to everyone.