For perspective here I, and everyone I know who have worked for startups as an employee, have never seen a single penny from stock options. Maybe one day I will, but I consider them to be nothing more than a potential pleasant surprise down the line.
At a previous company, I exercised my stock options when I left. This cost me about $4K. Two years later, I got $12K back... not a bad return, but certainly not the "potential for early retirement" I was told when I joined.
Real world example: low to mid level engineers at Uber joining in 2014/2015 at this point have stock worth over $2m over 4 years if Uber successfully IPOs at $100b+. By that time, Uber was already at "scale", offering RSUs (options strike price would be so expensive that it would be a huge risk to exercise), and that $2m is almost definitely more than what you'd otherwise have received in the same amount of time working at Google or FB.