I did not, but that’s because I joined late and had a high strike price. I also turned down a second market offer to sell at around $15/share. Oops.

Many people sold during internal private liquidity events, and they did well. If you joined early you did well.

No, generally not. 23andMe only ever did ISOs prior to the SPAC merger, not RSUs, and they had a quite high strike price. There was a 6 month insider lock up against selling, so by the time most of us could sell, the price had tanked. By the time I was able to sell, the share price was so low that only my oldest options from when I started at the company in 2014 were in the money.

I ended up making a few 10s of thousands. Not the 100s it would have taken to compensate for the low pay for all those years. And I probably did better than most by selling what I could when I could. Most people weren't in the money at all.

Maybe if you timed the market perfectly you could have done well. I don't know that anyone did.

Only the ones who cashed out on the private market before the company went public