There's this obsession now about how everything in tech needs to be worth it strictly monetarily without paying attention to anything else. Personally, I think that attitude is toxic. Teachers don't teach because of how much they'll get paid. Nurses don't become nurses because of how much they'll get paid. Same for fire-fighters, non-profit workers, artists, and everyone else doing jobs they find particularly fulfilling.

The same ought to be true of start-ups. Sure, you can make more expected money working at Facebook redesigning their like button, or whatever. But, at a start-up, you can have a huge hand in building something much bigger than yourself from scratch. You get to be a jack-of-all-trades, learning a bit of everything, making something hundreds of thousands of people will use go 0 to 1. You get to be incredibly important to the company and have a say in just about every decision if you want it. That role is still romantic to me, and that's why I've worked and continue to work at start-ups. I know I can make more money somewhere else. I don't care. And I want to work with other people who don't care either. If your motivation is just money, there are plenty of big faceless companies doing fun stuff like ad-tech that will be happy to pay you, and you'll be doing your start-up coworkers a favor by leaving.