I am not sure why people on HN state/claim all sorts of outrageous salaries in the Bay area. It gives a very distorted view of reality and frankly harmful to both employers and employees.
It’s not unreasonable to believe someone could keep their stock for 8 years and have the combined total be worth 2.2M.
A more realistic and cautious way to do a startup (for normal people) would be (see Nassim Taleb's description of Extremistan/Mediocristan for ideas - https://kmci.org/alllifeisproblemsolving/archives/black-swan... and https://www.capitalideasonline.com/wordpress/mediocristan-vs... );
1) Hold down a regular job for a decent period of time and earn as much as you can.
2) Save, Save, Save i.e. no risky investments on a large portion of your income. This is your safety net.
3) Simultaneously, get started working on your ideas/company by yourself or with a close-knit group. Spend no money; only your effort and time.
4) Once you have the whole picture/Prototype/MVP figured out estimate how much it is going to cost you to move ahead. All information is available on the net and hence do your proper research i.e. don't pay any "consultant" for advice. You can also shoot an email and seek advice from people like Paul Graham/Joel Spolsky etc. Remember, "Fortune favours the Brave".
5) As long as it is bearable, spend your or group's money to move ahead. It is important to cut any and all unnecessary expenses at this stage. Spend only what is needed and not a penny more.
6) Once the above is stable, you can now decide on whether you want to quit your day job and spend your whole time on your "New" company. This will be a function of your safety net savings mentioned above.
7) In order to not blow everything on a idea/company which may not pan out, set a threshold on your expenditure dropping below which you will approach others for money (i.e. VC/Angel etc.) or abandon the idea/company and return to being a regular salary man. This is to ensure that you don't end up on the streets.
8) Your are now at the stage where you are proceeding with your own company or have gone back to salaried employment and hopefully working on taking a second crack at entrepreneurship.
Good luck and Godspeed :-)
You can get $150k from a lot of sources these days. The value of the YC network is far beyond that.
A person saving 100% of their net of taxes and living expenses would have to see a return of well into double digits every year to accumulate $2.2M over 8 years or so, because their base savings rate over that period will be (probably far) less than $1M under optimal circumstances.
It isn’t at all common enough to obviate the need for things like YC.