$250k base salary. That's not top of market if the other $550k are illiquid options with no clear liquidity horizon.

I have a close friend who got Sr Engineer offer from Bolt. The 500k yearly TC is somewhat misleading because it’s assuming more than 2x growth in evaluation. While they may very well achieve that, you’re not gonna see the full 500k for an uncertain amount of time. More people should be aware of the nuances in these compensation figures.

Wow, I imagined stock comp would usually be based on current valuation.

It is, if they're offering RSUs rather than options. With options there's no meaningful "current valuation" since they're granted with a strike price that should be equal to their last valuation, there's only a potential distribution of future outcomes based on expected multiples (incl. 0).

Yup, same!

I know of this org pretty well; they just did a massive round compared to their size and any rational business metric. They've convinced a big group of investors that they can basically disintermediate almost all ecommerce transactions, but this is a very frothy/competitive space, with really big players like Apple and Amazon, plus your paypals and a bunch of other unified checkout players. I'm skeptical but have my popcorn & I'm ready to watch.

If that's not indicative of another dotcom bubble I don't know what is. That's an insane amount of money to be paying, especially for a pre-IPO company.