When considering opportunity cost, it’s more time efficient, imho, to live a life well lived and buy lottery tickets than spend decades to “earn” a billion when it’s more luck than “hard work.” You can do everything right and still fail (startup failure, early employee dilution, etc). You can also fail your way to being a billionaire (Adam Neumann @ WeWork). Best to recognize the sham (most startups fail, most startup equity ends up worthless or at parity with what you would’ve earned as wages elsewhere) before you’ve spent too much precious time on it you can never buy back. Survivorship bias is rampant in the startup scene, Silicon Valley even more so.

One of my side projects is a website where you can convert startup equity offers to the number of lottery tickets you need to buy to have equal odds of financial success (while working a more stable and/or lucrative job), it’s just not done yet. I hope to share it soon!

TLDR Don’t work at a startup, get exposure to that asset class or equivalent returns via other means. You’re just making founders and investment funds wealthy with your precious time.