In startups your risk is that 95% of the value of your labor goes into a pool of options whose underlying security (startup stock) never achieves any liquidity event. Also, you do have to factor into your analysis the fact that the tech giants also have options, which are likely not to expire worthless, and also have some upside as well, since they are listed on public exchanges. If startups thought more like Buffett "preferred holding period is forever" they would counterintuitively actually compensate employees with cash more competitively once they achieved positive cash flow (this actually seems to be occurring in a few companies, there are just too few positive cash flow startup examples for quality analysis on this front). More startup employees I know are actually just enjoying their work and salary instead of making a giant sacrifice on a longshot bet in exchange for work they don't think is sustainable. That being said I think what Bezos wrote about amazon's work ethic will always hold true "you can choose to work harder, longer, or smarter but in our case you can't choose 2 out of 3" - paraphrased from memory. Ultimately startups and big companies are trying to design compensation packages that create maximum productivity and the best description I've heard of this is to "take the issue of money off the table". Hard to do that with under market salaries and iffy stock options.