- after 2008 Great Financial Crisis
- actual startup, not spinoff from larger company
- financially successful exit
- early non-founder employees made a substantial amount of money?
(Not lost in all this: over the years the tax treatment of option grants has changed! It used to be a hugely advantageous way of giving employees something of value, and that's been eroded a lot.)
Amazon had north of 100,000 employees by the time I joined in 2012. The "plucky startup" days were long gone, even if they did still tell the fable of the door desks at every orientation class
There were also suddenly a lot of people without a home to sleep in, and suddenly a lot of homes on the market.
Basically, right after a crash is the best time to do anything.
It's harder to know from acquisitions, but I'd guess that most of those with sale prices >$1b generated ~10-250 non-founders with $1m+ share packages. I think that the Qualtrics founders said that they minted 250 millionaires from their initial sale to SAP.
There are always cooler heads raising alarms on these booms. What turns them into bubbles is the inflection point where there are more people coming for the dream than for the thing that motivates people who understand the risks and know the statistics.
I seem to remember 2015 or near it as that inflection point. Tech media went from worrying about the steady march of unicorns to not talking much about valuations.
Have a moat* or get exhausted battling against other similar startups until one is the major winner.
Technology is the easy part (for most people) Winning the battle is the hard part.
TO summarize, win battle=big-payday
You don't reach for VC if you just want a lifestyle business, much like you don't reach for mafia money just to pay down your mortgage earlier. You have to know who you're getting in bed with, and what their expectations are.
I understood "lifestyle business" to be a company that tries to be adoptable to the lifestyle of the founder/owner, but maybe I understood it wrong or it changed.
I mean... we all agree, it would seem, this is not the path to getting rich for most people. And it's unhealthy and stressful, so it's also not the best way to work.
So it has to come down to "the mission". You must be doing something so amazing, so innovative, a boon to mankind, that all else is secondary and you're willing to endure financial risk and a stressful job, right. Right?
But no. Most startups' products are unremarkable or banal -- with some honorable exceptions -- and mankind doesn't really care either way.
It is hard to build a successful business out of even a most mundane ideas. That alone can be a great accomplishment that many people strive for. Also to be able to set and execute initiatives is also a great motivation. Seeing the fruits of your labor can be very rewarding.
[1] And possibly contacts, or safety net, or wealthy family and/or friends.
I wouldn't say I'm an old-timer by any metrics, but even back in 2012 when I first discovered and joined HN, I remember it was pretty clear in the community (and people I spoke to around me) you shouldn't go to work at a startup if you were looking for "a lot + safe" money.
Sure, you could belong to the 0.001% and work on the next Dropbox, but most likely you would end up not, so don't start at a startup to chase riches, as there are better venues for that. Do work at a startup if the environment/mission/team feels right to you, but with no expectations of a big payday-exit.