Not making any other assumptions here, but I think this is a great example of something that's become more and more obvious to HNers over the past few years: from a financial perspective, if you have an opportunity to join a FAANG vs a startup, it pretty much almost always makes financial sense (usually much more sense) to join the FAANG. And since it usually makes a LOT more financial sense, it can often make a lot of the other points moot as well, because you could save so much more working at a FAANG that you could afford to take time off to do whatever you want, or retire early.

I mean, in this example Baremetrics actually had a pretty good outcome, better than most, and the employee's basically got very, very little for their overall equity. Even the founder probably got less than a mid/senior level FAANG employee would get (and the FAANG employee had no risk).

Of course, not everyone can get an offer at a FAANG, but again, if you could get an offer, startups basically never make sense anymore. You almost always will get more even if the startup hits, which is rare.