> Also, you will form bonds and make friends that won't happen at a bigco.
I heard this about university, and here it is again about startups.
Counter-anecdote from me: I never made any long-lasting connections at college, and I never made any long-lasting connections at a startup, either. (And I've worked at ~10 of them.)
Instead, my only real adult friendships have come from either working at bigcos, or from extra-curriculars (e.g. social hobbies, sharing creative works and then meeting people who liked them, etc.)
Agree. Most, like 99.9% startups are not going to make ANY money. Even if there is a positive outcome for the startup, how much money you could make out of it, is still questionable.
If you want money, go to big companies, your reward is likely to be much more bigger and stable.
This is a really good point. I enjoy startups because I feel I'm relatively more productive in unstructured environments, which in turn makes the work more enjoyable. That is definitely not true of all people.
I'm continually surprised that this needs to be repeated, almost biweekly here on HN.
As someone advanced in my career, I enjoy startup life for the startup life. As a noob out of college, I very, very highly recommend startup life as you will never be so risk tolerant again in your life, and you can't get the experience any other way. You can afford to fail and then move on to a bigco if you want stability. Also, you will form bonds and make friends that won't happen at a bigco.
Someone should put together a spreadsheet showing the value of a 1% equity stake at seed and series A for YC companies that have had an exit. (It's not hard.) I guess airbnb hasn't had an exit yet, but we can just use $40bn as a reasonable number.
All the online dilution calculators are targeted to founders, so they can model and make raise decisions at each round. For us, it's a very easy depreciation calculation. Anyway 1% post-A results in .52% post-E using a calculator I found easily that has reasonable defaults for each round. That $200MM of airbnb, really astounding. Do consider it took 13 years to get there. OTOH your 1% would have been good after only 4 years.
Let's say you limit your startup job search to just YC companies. Now you just need to factor in the number of YC companies, the number of employees at Series A and earlier, your likelihood to get 1% (unlikely to impossible), and your likelihood of landing in a successful startup.
YC could make this type of calculator online for anyone but that would discourage employment. Someone here can easily produce it.
Please don't make the mistake of thinking you can pick the winner and therefore your likelihood of success is multiplied. You can't. Even YC (and all other incubators) can't, that's why they spray the money around.