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Comment by dpeck | Hacker News Reader

right, and that is completely valid to discuss.

I think it does a disservice to the other problems and discussion points to toss everything under "risk".

What else is opportunity cost in this case but risk that an early employee at a startup misses out on a much better financial endpoint at a non-startup with much higher salary and benefits (401k matching, etc)?

But what would you call it besides risk? ie you're gambling (risk) that your opportunity cost will be made whole (and hopefully even exceeded!) via a liquidity event.

I'm not denying that it is risk, I argue that it doesn't allow for the subtleties and nuances (opportunity cost vs responsibility increase vs positive/negative association after exit/failure).

There are a lot of different variables involved and a great many of them boil down to calculated gambles on the part of the employee and employers. Those are worthy of discussion and there are plenty of discussions to be had around those. But simply calling it "risk" and saying you need more of the upside is so simplified its nearly meaningless and impossible to have a conversation about with everyone involved having the same idea about what is being discussed.

There are certainly non-monetary benefits to working at startups, as well as costs. It certainly makes sense to include those as part of the calculation, but money is not a small part of that, either.

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