Why I'm leaving OpenAI and what I'm doing next

You were downvoted but you’re not wrong. They are navel gazing. However, they are the main character of their own story so to speak. they just fail to see the plot and other characters around them. Lesswrong is self-indulgent narcisssim purporting to be rationalism

Early employees of a unicorn are a bit different.

The early grants are worth far more, especially so here.

Typically it's said for companies that experienced massive growth in valuation. For example, if you got $400k in NVDA 4 years ago it would be worth $4M today. In order for your compensation to stay the same, you'd need to get a $1M refresh every year which is unlikely unless you got promoted to a VP position.

At my last startup, as an early employee I got something like ~250,000 shares of restricted stock. 3 years in I got renewal options for an additional 10,000 shares. With the renewal being 4% of the shares I was previously granted, it is not much of an incentive.

If a stock sees explosive growth, the stock you were granted before the growth that has now vested might be worth far more than the stock you were granted after the growth.

Except at the very beginning of a company when the valuation is entirely meaningless, companies figure out the dollar amount they're going to grant, and convert that into a number of shares. This means post-growth you're getting much less. That leads to the balance shifting. Would you stick around for next year's $200k if you've already got $10m in the bank, probably not.

If the stock is liquid, then this makes sense. However, if it's not, then you might not want to hold that much stock (or especially options) in a single company. It's also common for the refresher grants to be much smaller, especially if you were an early employee.

Refreshers never make up for the monster gains those early grants get at startup growth rates.

If you joined Tesla in 2019 and got a 5 year grant worth 1 million dollars, that is roughly 48000 shares over 5 years.

Even assuming a flat refresher, on that 5th year you would get another $200k worth of stock at the now 10x share price, coming in at like 850 shares. Compare that to the 9600 shares you have coming in from that initial grant. It’s a huge dive in total comp after that initial grant runs out even with a good refresher program.

The only companies where this isn’t a problem are big ones with mediocre growth (Google, Amazon, Apple, Netflix-ish, etc).

Nvidia is another example of a company that effectively has employees pulling in multiple millions a year in stock that will fizzle out 4 years after their huge surge last year.

When you go from a TC of $3mil/year down to $300k/year, you definitely reevaluate if it’s time to retire or go do something new.

Some companies are notoriously cheap about refreshers, Salesforce being one famous example.