This is not to imply "yes" or "no"; it's a very personal answer. At the companies I've been in, there are some who thrived moving into new roles as the company grew, and there were others that would have been happier and more successful taking their skills to the next startup.
This generally leads to stock-option based compensation; which, in turn, expires 30 days after employee leaves.
This economics -as practiced presently- strongly implies for savvy startupy people to work only on startups of their own; which in turn makes early hiring extremely difficult.
There are 2 points of equilibrium here:
* The current one is people leading less savvy people on. This leads to a lot of resentment; see rest of HN for that.
* a much less wrong solution would be to have secondary markets set up significantly earlier in the game (post series a); which would make stock & options immediate liquid. Despite sales difficulties(for finding counter parties for that), this can be a huge advantage during hiring, as employees don’t have to take on lottery tickets; and allow early employees to resign with much less resentment.
I've mostly worked in small companies with tiny engineering teams but I've had a go at some larger companies as well. Personally I thrive in the small companies and wither in the large ones. In the small companies I tend to spend a large part of my day writing code (which I love), meetings are rare and typically to the point. In the big companies I've found it hard to find stuff to do and the meetings are many and repetitive. It seems to me that the bigger companies hire for redundancy. In the largest company I worked for (~3k ppl) I typically received >100 emails/day + dozens of slack channels. In my current job we're 8 ppl and I rarely get more than 1 email/week :)!
There's something to be said about riding the growth wave in a company or industry that is on the up-and-up, and it usually involves more career opportunities, fatter project budgets, and just a general sense of optimism from everyone else you work with. Of course there are exceptions/outliers, but in general, "yes".
The inverse of this is, "Do you want to be working at a company that is shrinking?" and I think the answer is generally, "no".