> Going from L5-L7 is _not_ trivial

It is trivial compared to growing a company successfully from $10M valuation to $100M valuation + an exit.

[citation needed]

Frankly, many more aspects of trying to grow your career from l5-l7 are out of your hands than they are when you're at a startup.

The vast majority of startup success is luck...

There are literally thousands of people going from L5-L7 at the major tech companies per founder successfully exiting a >$100M company.

Thousands, you say? [source missing]

There are only ~2300 Series C companies.

You're going to need to be this size to have a ~$100M+ exit.

There's about ~5 years between funding Series C and Series D [1].

Only ~55 Series C companies got funding in Q1 [2].

Only ~39 Series D companies got funding in Q1 [1].

You're going to have a MAX of about ~.7 * ~2300 * 1/5 = ~322 successful > $100M VC exits per year.

Ultimately, you really need to IPO to have a successful exit - and there's only ~257 per year total, only ~65% of which are VC = ~167.

~5% of FAANG is L7+ - if you're including Microsoft, Nvidia, AirBNB and all the other companies with FAANG-like pay - you're at >2M employees.

That's ~100k If the average tenure is ~10 years before retirement - you're looking at ~10k per year.

Okay - it's about ~100 per successful exit.

[1] https://carta.com/blog/state-of-private-markets-q3-2023/

[2] https://www.mosaic.tech/saas-startup-funding/series-c

Not saying I disagree with your conclusion, but if the question is about which is more likely from the perspective of an individual considering going either route, there’s also an implicit “given that an attempt was made”. You’re only comparing the absolute occurrence of each type of event rather than the occurrence relative to the number of attempts made.

> 2. Going from L5-L7 ... a lot of opportunities for showy work and your own gamesmanship around corporate politics.

Can you say more about that?

A lot of the FAANG companies (all?) have promotion processes that are basically a combination of both peers and managers strongly pulling for your promotion. It often takes a few years just to end up on people’s radars, and that’s a few years of delivering lots of high visibility work and doing lots of tech talks and other sort of corpo-social tasks to get your name out. In a lot of ways, it’s like you’re constantly applying for a new job.

I meant say more about the gaming the politics part, not so much the showmanship and self-promotion part. Say there are several people who meet the criteria to get promoted, which ones tend to get it and which not, based on which political behavior?

Tends to be the one with more friends. That’s pretty much it. That’s the politicking.

Allies, not friends. In that sort of environment, what sort of things get you allies? other than what you mentioned. For example when you say gaming the process, how to approach reviews?

Allies/friends -- doesn't really matter what you call it. It's people in your corner. There's no gaming that I'm aware of. You just have to hope that you are able to get on peoples' good sides. Usually that works alright in the normal course of being a friendly and contributive coworker, but god forbid you have someone who has a chip on their shoulder about you.