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Comment by lpolovets | Hacker News Reader

Here's my example from LinkedIn: I joined early (company had a founding team of almost 10 people, and I was the 3rd or 4th hire after that). I got 0.3%. I vested about 0.135% before going to another company. Sold 1/5 of that in secondaries before the IPO, leaving me with ~.11% undiluted. After all of the dilution, it was more like .05%. I sold that shortly after the company went public (at an avg. valuation of roughly $10b). Uncle Sam took a big chunk. I have a few software eng friends who joined LinkedIn shortly after I did, stayed well past their initial 4-year grants, and IIRC after full vesting they had 0.10%-0.15% after dilution at the time of IPO.

On thing to add: early equity grants used to be much smaller in 2003, so I wouldn't be surprised if an early employee of Airbnb or Dropbox or a similar company will have more like 0.3%-0.5% after dilution at the time of IPO.

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Thanks for being so open. I like hearing real world experiences. My take away here is that unless you are founder, or the company goes for billions, you don't really make much.

I think that's probably true. One exception might be very early employees who get 0.5%-3.0% equity in a company that sells for $100m or $200m. You can probably walk away with $1m or $2m for a couple of years of works. With a multi-billion-dollar exit, you might end up with $10m or $20m someday, but it'll be many years into the future -- and there will be many tempting opportunities to sell stock early along the way.

> many tempting opportunities to sell stock early along the way

This. It's really easy to make money in hindsight. If you'd bought GOOG at the IPO in 2004 and held it until 2007 you would have had a 6.6x return. If you'd held it until today you would have had a 13x return, but a much lower IRR. On the other hand, if you'd bought Zynga at the IPO you'd be down 66% five years later and still waiting for it to bounce back.

It's a lot easier to make hypothetical money in the past than it is to make real money in the future.

I have always lived by the rule "would you invest your money in the company?" when deciding whether to sell RSUs. I'm not sure if it would be any different with larger equity %s.

On one hand, the only reason to work for a start up is to take the risk and go all or nothing. On the other hand, I would never invest in a start up.

I probably would sell off a huge portion (~70%) of equity before the start up reaches $500 million given the chance

Early employees in a startup I was at that went public in 2001 were making $3-6Million

We went out for $1B though (on raising < $2M of VC money)

Sadly I was not in that group of people

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