Let’s put it this way. If you do well as a YC admissions engineer, and you dedicate the next ten years to growing YC, what are the chances you’ll walk with less than a 0.01% share? It wouldn’t make sense for YC not to offer that. Your work will help make or break YC’s core investment decisions.

And ten years is just the maximum theoretical upper bound that I can think of — e.g. the initial role doesn’t include equity, and then you ask for equity a few years later. (That scenario seems far more implausible than them just including equity vesting in the offer. Yet even in that case, you’d still end up with your 0.01%.)

Here’s something closer to a proof: YC is a startup. Startup jobs come with equity compensation. YC’s portfolio is approaching $1T (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29064559). 1% of $1T is $10B. And 0.01% of $10B is $1M.

That’s the lower bound. YC likely has a higher stake than 1%, especially when you consider the Continuity Fund. And they’ll likely be granting more than 0.01% to a product engineer on the admissions team that can provably grow YC’s portfolio over ten years.

So the absolute lower bound is around $1M over ten years from equity alone. It’s hard to estimate the upper bound — exponential investments are counterintuitive — but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was around $10M, and I wouldn’t rule out $40M. After all, $10M over 10 years is $1m a year, and top engineers at top tech companies make ~$600k in total comp. so $10M is just keeping pace with Google, and $40M is keeping pace with YC’s tremendous growth.