Not sure what your point is about $3MM over 10 years. Why would you divide it over anything other than the number of years you actually worked at the company?
You've assumed I was a senior engineering hire. I was in a junior non-technical role a year out of college.
> “Not sure what your point is about $3MM over 10 years.”
Please re-read my comment to help understand.
> “You've assumed I was a senior engineering hire. I was in a junior non-technical role a year out of college.”
Where did I make an assumption about junior vs senior level?
As for your claim you were given this grant for a non-technical role 1 year out of college, I think it’s more likely you’re just lying to troll this comment thread. Just in a Bayesian sense, the conditional probability that you’re lying is higher than that this is a true story.
It’s not impossible that this could have happened for a non-tech hire with no experience, but that mere possibility also is irrelevant compared with the far greater probability that this is just made up.
I don't think there's anything particularly special about my situation other than I was fortunate to join a now unicorn early on.
Your shares are likely going to get hugely diluted exactly because of growth investing like in the article. Investors and founders will essentially trade away your share of the company in new rounds, while they get huge payouts for it, your shares may grow a small amount, again realized over some long time horizon.
Let’s take an extreme example and say your shares double in value (not likely) through the remaining funding rounds, and eventually in another ~7 years you can actually sell them in some liquidity event.
So that’s $3 MM (gross) over 10 years. That works out to be $300,000 / yr in equity compensation.
Certainly very high. But not any kind of crazy number. Definitely there are rank and file engineers in FAANG companies, Wall Street, and other industries getting annual RSUs or bonuses well beyond that without having to wait 10 years to realize it or have the risk that it folds or you get laid off and lose a bunch of future value, and have a high base salary, good benefits, and good work/life balance the whole time.
Given that even a crazy outcome like $3 MM annualized over 10 years isn’t significantly better than other reasonable total comp opportunities, this overall paints a really bad picture for start-ups.
Your case, which is nearly about the best lottery ticket someone could get, is only slightly better than a competitive position at many public companies, finance shops, etc.
Meanwhile, almost all start-up outcomes would be far worse.