From the data that I could find, it's perhaps at best 10% of all tech companies that even go public (and very possibly as few as 1%). It's far more reasonable to assume a company is the 90% or 99% of companies that do not go public rather than anything else.

My experiences are the same that equity in private companies is not significant. Worse yet, in all of my experiences the private equity I could have bought or did buy were all 100% losses.

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-Tech-startups-eithe...

On a different topic, I think your response mrkurt is a violation of the commentary guidelines:

- "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

- "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

He was responding to me and that’s a very reasonable response. When I was in the market for your standard enterprise CRUD Enterprise dev jobs, I would have taken a cash compensation of $150K - $160K and zeroed out the equity.

What I wouldn’t do is jump through any hoops like a take home test when jobs in that pay range are (were? I don’t know what the current market is like) a dime a dozen and I could just do one phone screen and a soft skills interview for half a day and get a job making that much.

Oh, I guess that could sound snarky. I wasn't feeling snarky, though. We are the wrong place for a lot of people to work.