If you have ~5+ years of experience and live in the US, things haven't changed. Regardless, negotiating matters more than ever.
At startups you negotiate for equity instead of salary but a lot of the same advice applies.
At startups you negotiate for equity instead of salary but a lot of the same advice applies.
The other benefit of not-unlimited is having it paid out when you leave. But if I had 6 weeks a year PTO, I'd just use it all anyway, so the part where it gets paid out isn't a big deal to me.
I have 5+ years experience at a no name place and can’t even get an interview anywhere. Maybe my resume is shit but I’ve tried many different versions with no luck in the last 4-5 months.
Just started my own business instead.
And all the FAANG combined probably don’t even have half that many positions, with negotiable salaries, in total worldwide.
The majority of positions at any of these (except maybe Netflix) are not hired through negotiable salary packages of the types relevant to the post. I never said anything about overall employee count.
Have you never read a report from any of the FAANGs?
e.g. Out of Google’s 183,000+ total headcount… maybe a quarter are engineering positions with negotiable salaries of any kind.
Getting some work experience and then starting my own thing was a better fit for me.
"You can't write me a check?" I said, "No, I -- a check? Hell yeah, I can write you a check! I thought you needed money. Tell you what, I'm just gonna pay the whole thing off right now! I'm gonna be a congressman when I grow up."
But at the time the employee is negotiating this has already been decided. The company has some valuation and you are offering some known percentage of that scarce resource. You could argue that the valuation itself is the thing being manipulated (which is partially true), but that doesn't change the cost of the offer to the company in units of equity %
If you think about the amount of money given up as a startup employee you will definitely get some winnings.
For example, say as a startup employee you are earning/being compensated 80,000 a year in equity. If you bought $80,000 of lottery ticket’s each year how much would you win. Depends on the lottery but most lottery’s have a rough payout of approximately 50-70%. Let’s say it’s 50%. So you would expect to receive back $40,000 per year.
Do half of all startups equity turn into cash, I think not. So probably more likely to make money from the lottery.
But most startup people don’t work at most startups.
For the most part, outcomes largely track from strategy and execution.
The purpose is to trade EV for a small probability of high payout. It's less extreme than the big ticket lotteries but more extreme than a scratcher. If that's not for you, don't do it
Also your last point is either obviously not true (if you're talking about big lottery winnings) or trivially true (if you're talking about $1000 scratcher prizes). More people made life changing money from a single company (Facebook) than all California lottery winners combined across all time
You are making an empirical claim that can be made rigorous, it's just off by several orders of magnitude
Surely the calc is, the number of money gambled in startup equity versus the amount of money gambled in the lottery.
Do startups payout at .5 or above, I think not.
Also…the lottery and startups work very differently.
Never take equity over salary. Equity at a startup is a lottery ticket. Would you agree to be paid $10,000 less for $10,000 in lottery tickets? For $20,000 in lottery tickets?