Is there a silicon valley success story that doesn't involve the team working long hours, especially in the early days?
Having given up just... well about half a million working at a big tech company, but they got to change the world or something.
I daresay even the majority. But this is not the narrative anyone wants to paint, because it implies "laziness" or "luck" and those are counter-cultural concepts.
But in the mid-90s, I worked at AOL, and I was there during a period of very high growth. I did my 72-hour workdays where I spent two nights in a row working straight through in the office. I did the on-call schedule. I did the 100+ hour workweeks.
I did the calculations once, and with all the stock options I started with, plus the additional ones I got later, after all the splits, I could have gotten as much as 16 million bucks, if I had sold them all at peak.
At the time AOL, was a pretty damn big employer. And it had become a toxic enough environment that I could no longer continue to stay there. So, I ended up leaving almost all of that money on the table when I left.
I’ve worked long hard hours in various employers since, but never again quite the levels we saw at AOL. And I’ve never gotten anywhere remotely close to those kinds of options/money again. But I’m okay with that, because I’ve had some amazing experiences in my life, worked with some fantastic people, and gone to some wonderful places.
But it is possible to work at a place that is both monstrously big and also at high compensation levels, even down in the trenches. Sure, you won’t make billions that way, but you could actually make millions.