The numbers in this article are way off. A higher end employee (senior/chief engineer) who joins at say #30 in a company will still have a decent exit on a $250million exit. I say this as someone experienced in this.
s/will still/can/g
It was decent, not life changing. I probably should have negotiated significantly higher. Hindsight etc.
I do think I should have at least negotiated double what I had. But I was young and had no clue about stock and exits etc. Even given that, I did ok considering I was #30.
I still stand by what I said. The numbers are a bit off. A $250m exit is good for most of the early employees. Although of course a $250m exit is extremely rare.
While I grant that at that point in my life I was older than the startup norm (40 but very productive due to a quarter century's experience and study from the very start of software engineering), there was some serious value to such a job back then. I.e. a lot better than the job I took in semi-desperation at Lucent in 2001 just when it started downsizing from 106,000 to 35,000 employees....
And doing "OK" with equity being employee #30 plus the wonderful resume enhancer of "my product earned over 50% of the company's revenues" is not bad, not bad at all. Being able to tie a serious technical accomplishment to an outsized portion of the company's bottom line speaks to everyone.
The main benefit to joining a startup isn't even the equity (it's crappy everywhere, these days) but the opportunity for advancement. If you can get a high-level position that wouldn't otherwise be available and get promoted quickly, it can be worth it for the credibility.
That said, many startups actually under-title their people and get into the social-climbing mentality in which the develop a pattern of hiring people above their old hands. If you work for one of those, then you should just get out. Companies tend to be either in a promote-from-within mode or a install-flashy-outsider mode, with not much of a middle ground. The second type of startup is good if you're an outsider, for bumping your comp and title, but not a place to stay for more than a couple of years and certainly not a place where you should work more than enough to hold place.
> Credit really only goes to founders when a startup exits for less than $250 million. Under a $1 billion, a handful of the early employees will be able to receive credit. And above $1 billion, the number of early employees who can claim credit continually increases with exit value all the way up to a Google or Facebook, where people will mention and receive acknowledgment for even their triple-digit employee number.
They're saying employee #20 at a $250M exit doesn't get mentioned much generally. Employee #20 at a google/facebook exit does, generally.