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Have Startup salaries gone up recently to match the market? I had thought it's pretty understood that you are taking a significant paycut relative to established players to basically play the lottery with startup equity?

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Startup salaries have gone up a lot in the last few years from the boom in funding. Experienced engineers with several years of experience are clearing $200K+ in base, and getting a solid equity cut too: https://topstartups.io/startup-salary-equity-database/

Appreciate the link. Don't know if you're affiliated with the site but the ability to sort the data would be incredibly useful and the name of the Startup would be of interest as well like levels.fyi

Maybe the other way to look at it is, the "established players" can only employ so many people. Many of them are paying some pretty insane salaries now (I consider over $200K pretty insane) - but as I said, they can only employ so many people. In my case the salary is plenty good without even having to take equity into account. And the work is likely much more interesting than I'd get to do in an established company. Also, if the startup makes it I could be in a pretty good position being able to call a lot of my own shots as to what I'm going to work on and how I'm going to work on it - autonomy.

All that to say, it seems a lot more like a lottery trying to get a job with the established players (after jumping through all their interview hoops), and while the money might be better, the type of work, what you work on, the level of autonomy you're given (or not) is also very important.

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