Should I join a startup or a FAANG company?

It reaaaally depends on the market. Joining a startup in the last 5-ish years was mostly pointless and you would have made much more at FAANG (and given the pandemic prolly would have had much more job security).

I personally feel that the age of GOOG-FB style IPOs is over, and joining a 10+ person startup for monetary gain is probably not a good idea.

That being said, there are other good reasons for joining a startup and they have been discussed on HN multiple times.

The chat doesn’t include the (likely) Chance that the startup is not sold/ipo’d it that it is sold but not for enough for employee equity to be worth anything. There needs to be a thick orange band that goes in a flat line (where the options remain being worth their expected value, 0)

Startup! FAANG is designed to feed you well and pay you well and keep you well occupied until you have too many encumberments to create your own, potentially competitive, startup!