I am sure RSA are and will always be available to those with the skilleset that commands this level of compensation. I am unclear what would motivate the founding team or investors in a start-up to act otherwise.
Stock options used to be that differentiator for startups... now it's just an empty promise in most places.
Larger companies not only offer better compensation, but usually offer much better career development, responsibility growth, training and “learn by doing” opportunities.
The startup will promise you won’t be blocked by bureaucracy and as an early hire you can lead the design. Total lies. The bureaucracy and dysfunction will be even worse and probably involve a bunch of immature egos and “the design” will be endlessly compromised to get each successive round of diluting funding that yokes you to more and more traditional management bureaucracy through VCs.
After experiencing the special hell of unrestrained founders who don’t know what they are doing and nepotism hires all through middle management, most people quickly realize it’s an insane trap and wish for the comfort of large firm bureaucracy, where at least there’s some minimal policy protection against sexual harassment or cultivating alcoholism as a company value or generally grinding unwitting young people into the ground with 80 hour weeks.
It’s like a professor who did happen to get tenure listening to all the post docs talking about how awful academia is. I’m happy for that one lottery winner but their experience doesn’t count for anything.
Most startups are dynamic, most big corporations are not. They are 'big' because they are sitting on a value chain monopoly.
The same chocolate bars have been in my grocery aisle for 20 years. Variations on the same soap.
Some startups are very poorly run, but most are not led by 'unrestrained jerks'.
If you are going to a startup and doing a very rote, repetitive thing, then you're not very lucky, but most startup jobs are definitely not that.
The risk is that there is 'too much dynamism' and people and up spinning their wheels, over pivoting, crashing. But that's definitely 'dynamic'.
Early non-founder employees do tend to get screwed relative to the business vultures who show up later, the CTO getting $10 million/year brought on after the company has gone public but did nothing to get it there is just wasteful corporate cronyism.
My own experience with after 8 years at various London startups is one of career stagnation because (for various personal reasons) I don't have a personality that lets me thrive in these environments.
If you work at a startup the trick is you have to take the 5% of your work that’s interesting and try to make it seem like that was the 95%, when in reality the 95% is doing all the grunt work because the company cannot scale staffing to distribute that work evenly or according to specialization.
Usually the opposite.
At many large companies, people are frozen in operating jobs, and almost 'do' nothing.
Bell Canada (like Verizon), massive organization full of staff graft.
Companies that have a lock on revenue, fat monopolies, are where people park themselves.
Directories with large teams that do almost nothing. Years to make the smallest change in customer service inquiries etc..
The 'real' advantage at working at a startup, in my view - is that you actually get to 'do stuff'.
So when you say you don't work at a startup for monetary reasons, and that you don't care about shares, which has an expected value of real money despite the uncertain outcome, it's natural to wonder if you don't care about compensation aka money.
Founders shouldn't be exiting with massive rewards when the risk they took was only marginally higher than early employees.
Yeah, I enjoyed my time there and I learned a lot. But a mismanaged company shouldn't reward the management and leave employees with nothing after all is said and done.
Pay me a million for something I don't care about in a bad environment and I won't do good work.
Pay me 50k (I make more, but 50k is a good value for a good living here in the region) and let me do something I like in a fun environment and I get things done.
As much as I agree with the "lottery ticket" mentality, this line of thinking has been popular to parrot on HN for at least 5-10 years. And as far as I'm aware, startups don't have much trouble attracting senior talent. So until that changes significantly, they are going to continue offering lower salaries and bigger lottery tickets for as long as they can. Why would they do otherwise?
That seems like a pretty broad assessment to make on a hunch.
Once the valuation is higher, RSUs can shield employees from paying taxes until a liquidity event.
RSAs and RSUs are far less liquid than equity. They can typically only be sold into a company-wide liquidity event.