Any stories of employees with equity successfully taking home over $1m? $500k?

I&#x27;m at the bottom end of that range - here are my real numbers for one real option vesting story (on a throwaway):<p>1. I quit an engineering job at a bigco to become engineer #2 (employee #3) at a startup where I was given about 1.5%. I joined just after their initial fundraise.<p>2. I took a huge pay cut - from $120k in total comp at bigco to $60k at startup.<p>3. The startup was acquired roughly 2.5 years later by a larger startup, my pay went up to $140k and my options converted to roughly 0.1% of the larger startup.<p>4. I stayed for a year at the larger startup, vested half my options and purchased them, which cost me about $60k to exercise. This is a lot of money to come up with when you&#x27;ve been underpaid for a couple of years.<p>5. The larger startup was acquired by a large public company - my shares were worth just shy of $500k once the dust settled.<p>Overall, the money I lost in salary is a little bit less than what I gained in equity over that 3.5 year period, once you factor in taxes, exercise costs, the time value of deferred compensation, and the raises I presumably would have gotten if I had stayed at bigco.<p>I&#x27;d do it again in a heartbeat because the experience was amazing (and led me to start my own company), however, I would have a hard time advising anyone to take a big pay cut in exchange for employee equity for solely financial reasons.

Yes, my first startup job got me into the high end of that range, as employee #5, with a relatively small acquisition.<p>I know several people who took home much more from employee roles (albeit in larger acquisitions) in the recent past.<p>A lot of it has to do with who you work with. In every case I can think of, windfall money for employees came from founders with a track record of accomplishing that (or, in my case, a founder who would soon develop that track record, and was, in the company I was at, extremely committed to making sure his team was well compensated at liquidity).<p>This is one of the reasons I don&#x27;t love Paul Graham&#x27;s hacker startup thesis, about working very hard for 5-10 years so you can take it easy for the rest of your life. There are a lot of problems with that idea, but one of them is that it generates a lot of loss aversion instinct for founders.

I was employee, like, #1,000 or so for NetSuite -- hired as a QA engineer and eventually moved over to development. I was hired I think about two years before it went public, and stayed for six years overall.<p>My equity came out to about $300k. Which I know does not hit the thresholds that you put in the post, but clearly many of my coworkers who came in earlier and were more senior -- but still not founders nor part of the founding team -- did a lot better.<p>EDIT: I should point out $300k was more or less actual. If I had been really good at selling at the top of the market, it would&#x27;ve been more like $400k. I suppose that overall it might end up being more or less, I still have a few tens of thousands in stock, but most of it ended up being the down payment on my house. The $300k was after buying into the stock (since I wasn&#x27;t a super-early employee, many of my options cost like 10-25% of the then-market-value to buy), and after some taxes? But not all? AMT and prepayment of some taxes and stuff and my overall lack of financial discipline made it really hard for me to figure out how much tax I owed specifically on the stock.<p>Another EDIT: Something else to point out was that at NetSuite, this was NOT principally from my initial grant at hire. NetSuite gave new grants of stock every year with ones yearly review, and those grants were pretty generous. Everything was on the same five year vest with a one-year cliff, so I got my entire year 1 and year 2 grants and then fractions of my remaining years. The year 1 grant was at the lowest rate to buy in, but that wasn&#x27;t hugely important. I would guess that about 1&#x2F;3rd of the stock that I eventually realized came from my year 1 grant. I&#x27;ve never been sure if that&#x27;s common practice or not with other companies, and if someone could shed some light on that, it&#x27;d be awesome.

Worth pointing out that when people throw numbers around the stock value alone may sound impressive but that has to be compared against the opportunity cost that&#x27;s usually associated with that route. Usually those options are handed out because the employee is accepting less cash or other compensation than another employer might pay then for similar work.<p>Walking away with $750k after 5 years might sound fantastic, but in some cases the person might actually be worse off relative to someone (say a senior role at an established firm) that had a package of higher salary, sizeable annual cash bonus and other perks often not found at startups. One needs to study the whole picture, not just some cash out amount at a liquidity event.

I joined in Google in early 2005, post IPO, as an entry level SWE. I was probably employee #3000 - #9000 (there were about 3000 employees at the time).<p>I made over $2M from stock options. Lots of people sold their stock as soon as it vested, in which case it would&#x27;ve amounted to about $1M. If I had held out until now (the price spiked around 2013), it would have been closer to $4M.<p>I think people don&#x27;t understand the order of magnitude difference between great companies and astounding companies.<p>A great company is worth $300 M. Google is worth $300 B.<p>That means if you would have gotten two THOUSAND dollars from the successful company, you would get two MILLION dollars from Google [1]. 3 orders of magnitude is a big difference!<p>If your goal is to get rich, it&#x27;s perhaps a better strategy to join the right company at the right time, rather than start your own company (although that was definitely not my strategy).<p>Though this advice sounds obvious, I haven&#x27;t heard it in many places. I recall a startup class lecture [1] from a founder of Asana, on why NOT to do a startup. And he said don&#x27;t do it for the money -- because if you want to do it for the money, you should join a company like AirBNB or Dropbox now. These are companies that could be at a similar cycle in their growth as Google was in 2005.<p>In other words, join a great company that could be astounding.<p>Another source is Piaw Na&#x27;s book. I don&#x27;t really know him, and at first I thought it was weird to have a career strategy of choosing companies based on equity, but it&#x27;s definitely a logical thing to do if you&#x27;re so inclined:<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Engineers-Guide-Silicon-Valley-Startups-ebook/dp/B004Q9U19G" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Engineers-Guide-Silicon-Valley-Startup...</a><p>$2M doesn&#x27;t sound like that much any more, but when I see these HN threads about exits and equity, I believe I made out better than many startup founders, as a regular employee.<p>[1] caveat: I believe Google was still idealistic and generous in 2005; the Valley has changed a lot in the last decade, so YMMV<p>[2] I can&#x27;t find it here, but I thought it was? <a href="http://startupclass.samaltman.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;startupclass.samaltman.com&#x2F;</a>

I worked at Palantir from 2009 to 2014 (started as SysEng, pivoted to Infosec). I have only &quot;taken home&quot; enough to recoup the cost of exercising my options and paying taxes (ugh, AMT), but my stock is worth something in that range. A friend who started around the same time I did recently sold a little less than half of his stock for about $500k to a private equity fund. I also know of a few other non-executives who started before me who have cashed out over $500k.<p>EDIT: If anyone&#x27;s curious about selling pre-IPO stock, I have an email address in my profile and would be happy to share some knowledge. Seems like there&#x27;s not much out in the open about it.

Well in January of &#x27;95 I sold 1000 shares of Sun Stock that I had accumulated over the employee purchase program the previous few years. Sure it was only $35,000, this allowed me to purchase a car for cash rather than get a loan on it. When I sold the car in &#x27;99 to a used car dealer I realized the same 1000 shares, 4 years later were worth $1.6M.<p>Granted at 1995 it wasn&#x27;t a start-up any more, but it is an easy counter illustration to the myth that &quot;only founders make money.&quot; Granted, half or 3 of the 6 managers I had at Sun are actually quite well off with two being VC partners these days and one enjoying their post work life.

Graduated from an Ivy League engineering program in the late nineties. Worked in four different start ups. Never made any money. Of those four startups I only count two as being valid data points as they were funded by &quot;good&quot; VCs. The others were funded by rich people who in retrospect did not know what they were doing.<p>Now on my fifth startup as employee number 15-20 (not sure which since we are growing so fast). We are funding growth out of VC money. Good name brand VCs that everyone here would be happy to take money from.<p>Still, I have learned my lesson. I make my life plans as though I can only depend on my salary and my wife&#x27;s salary. Luckily for me, my wife is a lawyer from an Ivy and makes enough money that I don&#x27;t worry about failing too much.<p>Even though most of my peers who graduated with me are independently wealthy (Yahoo, Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), over the years I&#x27;ve learned to moderate my life expectations. My wife and I don&#x27;t expect to ever afford a big house in Silicon Valley. Our long term plan is to move somewhere cheaper.<p>That is unless startup #5 succeeds in a big way ... HAHAHAHA lets not kid ourselves. But its fun to imagine :)

Honestly I haven&#x27;t seen <i>anyone</i> in this industry get any significant money, outside of investors and owners, since the dotcom days. Back then I knew quite a few programmers that made a killing and still have money today from that era.<p>Large money comes from ownership and the inherent risk. No one will ever give you enough money to go away completely as an employee. Can you make a little scratch? Of course. This industry pays very well. But if you want 500k and up in lump sums? Being an employee is never going to make it happen imho.<p>And just for the record equity is not ownership. Go read up about all the maneuvers businesses can and will take to screw you out of your shares and you&#x27;ll open your eyes. Businessmen don&#x27;t give away anything they don&#x27;t have to. Just a reality. If you can navigate that minefield you may one day be the outlier and get rich. But more likely you&#x27;ll be fighting in court for years only to learn that well, you should&#x27;ve read the fine print.<p>Don&#x27;t get duped out here guys. Don&#x27;t do this to get rich. Do this because you <i>want</i> to do it and everything else, with hard work, will fall into place.

I&#x27;ve been in the valley for ~20 years, and I&#x27;ve only made money on my options once, about $250k on a company that had already ipo&#x27;ed a year before I joined.<p>That said, my wife and I earn a combined salary of just over $500k&#x2F;yr, and I much prefer this to stiking it rich via equity.

I spent ~3 years at Twitter (2010-2013) as an engineer and manager. Made a competitive salary while there. Left with almost $2m in equity (ISOs + RSUs).<p>I sold the bulk of my position quickly due to serious concerns about tying the bulk of my net worth to a single company&#x27;s future.<p>After strike price, AMT, and income tax I ended up with roughly $1m in cash. Probably could have been closer to $1.2m if I knew what I was doing tax-wise.<p>Not a reproducible pattern to be sure, but it was a nice outcome.

Facebook and Google both created literally thousands of millionaires, IIRC. Bad news, though: power law distributions of startup returns have some really toothy consequences for employees as well as for investors.<p>There exist some less famous answers I could give here but they would be socially embarrassing to friends&#x2F;colleagues. Let&#x27;s put it this way: IPOs are public, right? Each of them allocates 10%ish of the market cap to employees. If you guessed employees 1 to 100 split half of that you wouldn&#x27;t be insanely off base. If 5% of market cap is $100 million...<p>Another thing you could do, if you&#x27;re interested, is look up the Angels participating in an early round in a recent startup and check out their LinkedIn profiles. Most have an obvious tuple of (Company, Start Date) which itself explains accredited investor status.

&quot;...I think it means, as all other aspects of life, there are distinct clusters of people in this field, with little cross cluster exchange. Either you are in that group in which all of you make money or you are in the group that you and your friends none make much money....&quot; -alimoeeny<p>This is probably the best take I&#x27;ve read on what is going on. There ARE people who make a lot of money on equity, even as employees. The issue is that there are a lot more people who make nothing. This is actually what is supposed to happen. After all, most businesses fail.<p>If you made money through equity... then obviously the friends you worked with at that company made money too. And if you didn&#x27;t... then your friends, who were at the same company, probably made nothing as well.<p>Just as a matter of full disclosure, I&#x27;ve had two SUPER nice exits. I got them by NOT going out to Silicon Valley to try the internet startup route though. I stayed in the midwest and went the medical imaging route. The thing is this, there were&#x27;t 1000 other companies doing the same thing. So the odds of winning were much higher. So my personal advice would be to look at the KIND of company you&#x27;re getting equity from. Molecular Imaging startup??? Yeah... you&#x27;re probably gonna want as much equity as possible. Yet Another Consumer Web&#x2F;SmartApp startup??? Your odds of that equity being lucrative are much lower, you should plan accordingly.<p>Either way, it&#x27;s basically a lottery ticket. I got really lucky a couple of times. Others won&#x27;t. But it&#x27;s basically all down to luck of the draw. I just drew a straw from a pool with very few lots. Whereas the people in the Silicon Valley-Web&#x2F;SmartApp industry draw straws from a pool with millions of lots. In both cases, luck is probably a pretty big factor.

Marco Arment appears to have done pretty well on the Tumblr aquisition.<p>&quot;As for me, while I wasn’t a “founder” financially, David was generous with my employee stock options back in the day. I won’t make yacht-and-helicopter money from the acquisition, and I won’t be switching to dedicated day and night iPhones. But as long as I manage investments properly and don’t spend recklessly, Tumblr has given my family a strong safety net and given me the freedom to work on whatever I want. And that’s exactly what I plan to do.&quot;<p><a href="http://www.marco.org/2013/05/20/one-person-product" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.marco.org&#x2F;2013&#x2F;05&#x2F;20&#x2F;one-person-product</a>

Another things that is interesting, is the diversity of responses on this thread.<p>One saying &quot;I&#x27;ve been here for long, I cannot remember of anybody&quot; another one saying, &quot;of course I know plenty of people who made a lot of money&quot;.<p>I think it means, as all other aspects of life, there are distinct clusters of people in this field, with little cross cluster exchange. Either you are in that group in which all of you make money or you are in the group that you and your friends none make much money.

Sure. I&#x27;ve been a part of several startups that have achieved liquidity events and seen non-executive employees walk away with notable 6 figures in value. One coworker was able to purchase a vacation home for over $500k with cash from his post-tax proceeds, amongst other takeaways.<p>It happens, you just need a team that understands how to manage an equity plan through fundraising, growth phases, org evolution and is motivated to create value for everyone involved.

I was the first employee at Twitch, back in 2007. It worked out very well for me, but - having watched the sausage get made - I&#x27;m very aware of how incredibly lucky I&#x27;ve been. It could very easily have all come to nothing.<p>To be honest it&#x27;s not something I&#x27;d ever advise someone to do, even though it did happen to work out for me. I&#x27;d advise most people to join one of the big giants and enjoy a predictably comfortable life, and those with a certain temperament - like myself - to <i>found</i> a company instead of joining one.

I was an mid-seniority employee and netted in the low eight figures when I sold my equity stake after our IPO.<p>A couple important points I didn&#x27;t see others mention: 1. When I got an offer, I asked if I could take a lower salary to get more equity. They said yes.<p>2. I pre-exercised all my options. So as far as the IRS was concerned, there was no tax liability when I <i>exercised</i> the shares. This meant by the time I sold, it was a long term gain instead of a short term gain on a same-day exercise+sell. Highest federal + CA income tax rate is 53%, so I would have kept less than half if I didn&#x27;t get to pre-exercise.<p>3. I was able to sell when the Bush-era tax cuts were in place. So LTCG federal + CA rate was 25% for me. If I sold those shares today, it would be 37%.<p>So it worked out for me, but I&#x27;m still an engineer and 99% of my coworkers aren&#x27;t rich - which means I don&#x27;t talk about it, I don&#x27;t flaunt it so no Lambo in the parking lot, and I still try to nod in sympathy when they tell me about how expensive private school or summer camp is for their kids. In other words, my life hasn&#x27;t changed much aside from my bank accounts.

I was approximately employee #500 at Facebook (mid-level engineer), sold the stock pretty quickly after the IPO lockup ended. I left after 3.5 years. I came out with around $2.5m after taxes.<p>If I had sold at an optimal time, and fully vested. I would have around $4.5m. Almost everyone I know waited the full 4 years, but most did not wait for the stock to appreciate due to fear of concentrated holdings.

Consider the time frame in which these anecdotes took place. My understanding is that most people &quot;in the know&quot; believe the environment has changed such that you&#x27;ll never get a early Facebook employee type payout anymore. Founders, VCs and their lawyers have developed a plethora of tricks that disguise the way you&#x27;re getting screwed or ensure that, through some future trickery, you will. You&#x27;re best bet is to command a high salary worthy of your skills, choose a company that has a culture you&#x27;ll enjoy and assume that your options are worthless.

I joined a company in the summer of 2011 that IPOed in the spring of 2012. Company was under 400 employees at the time (I was around #~380). The company is not Facebook or Twitter.<p>My pre-IPO grants alone were worth over 1.5M, and my subsequent RSU grants probably added another 1M on top of that.<p>I&#x27;m using a throwaway account for obvious reasons, but happy to answer any questions. I definitely was not an outlier in terms of the payout.

I would say as a general rule, you either need to be in the A round of something REALLY big to survive dilution, for an acquisition. The alternative is that you join a public company or soon to be, that will have a very high market cap.<p>Big companies routinely pay equity packages in the $200k-$1m range for senior people. Some just pay you in cash, and let you make the choice on how much equity you&#x27;re up for.<p>I&#x27;ve been in 3 liquidity events, one which was a nice bonus for 4 years, one which I didn&#x27;t get anything, and the last which has worked out very well for me.

yes - I was part of a recent acquisition and made a little over 4M (pretax). I had 0.1% of the company. I was 24th employee (engineer). The company had 55 people at the time of acquisition. I joined about 14 months before the acquisition.

Several IndexTank employees did well. I can&#x27;t tell you the exact numbers, but some went from essentially zero net worth to owning property in the Bay Area.<p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/11/linkedin-buys-real-time-hosted-search-startup-indextank/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;10&#x2F;11&#x2F;linkedin-buys-real-time-hos...</a>

I&#x27;m now on my third startup that has IPOed (Zendesk). I&#x27;ve been relatively lucky, but I also tend to eschew media and gaming companies; my perception of the risk of long-term failure is higher for those. I prefer to work for B2B and infrastructural companies that serve up-market customers and provide real technological value (i.e. can&#x27;t be easily copied), and my choice has served me well thus far.

I&#x27;ve lived in the valley for like 7 years now and my only friends who have taken a ton from equity are early Twitter folks and the few who sold their startups to bigger companies like Google, Square, Twitter, whatever.

I joined a startup in the late 80&#x27;s. By the top of the bubble in the spring of 2000, I had pre-tax equity on the order of ~$10 million. Pretty good for a grunt in a cubicle. I was not a manager or any kind of super-star engineer.<p>Within a year, I was laid off and the stock had tanked 95%. I had broken all the rules of investing and rolled up a nice pile, but eventually got burned big time.<p>I would estimate my gross proceeds from stock sales at a little less than $1 million over about 10 years.<p>Shoulda, woulda, coulda...

As a fairly late hire at Twitch, my equity is somewhere between $500k and $1m.

I joined a startup several years ago as an early engineer. The company was acquired last year, and my equity was worth more than $1m after investors were paid.

I always go for salary first, equity second. So far, after half a dozen start-ups, I haven&#x27;t regretted that strategy.

Posting this under a throwaway for obvious reasons.<p>Employees at Facebook and Google who are high achievers (top 2-5% generally) make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in equity. I am one such lucky son of a bitch and know many others.<p>I&#x27;m well over 500k in cash after taxes at this point.

A somewhat dual question, can anyone offer advice on what to look for when negotiating an offer with an early-stage startup with a view towards achieving an outcome in this range? What are some red-flags in an equity offer that suggest it won&#x27;t be worth what it seems? What are some reasonable stipulations&#x2F;demands to make as the employee, to protect yourself and your stake?<p>I&#x27;ve been told that there are so many loopholes that equity in the range of half a percent or so is mostly worthless after dilution and taxes. But it seems there are folks here saying they had equity in that range which was worth a lot.

I don&#x27;t know if you will see anyone openly stating how much they walked away with, but you can do some basic math to figure out that this is very plausible.<p>Take Stripe, valued at $3.5b[1]. $1m &#x2F; $3.5 b ~= 0.029%, so any employee who vested at least 0.029% (after dilution) is a paper millionaire, and chances are their early employees have more than 0.029% equity vested.<p>[1]<a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-02/apple-pay-partner-stripe-valued-at-3-5-billion-in-new-funding" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2014-12-02&#x2F;apple-pay-...</a>

I don&#x27;t know of anyone personally who got an exit like that but I do know companies are staying private longer nowadays. This can increase the risk for employees. EquityZen (where I work) is trying to make it easier for employees to exit before their company has an liquidity event. This blog post explores Fab and Aereo and how a big exit is not always guaranteed: <a href="https://equityzen.com/blog/learning-from-fab-and-aereo-liquidity-matters/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;equityzen.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;learning-from-fab-and-aereo-liqui...</a>

This is a very good question. I also want to know if there are examples other than major successes like Google and Facebook.<p>One issue is when you want to hire people and you want to feel confident that you are offering them a &quot;real chance&quot; for financial success, even if it is a slim chance. I mean if you know that it is very likely that even when &quot;you&quot; have a win (whatever your goal is) and your investors have a win, still your employees don&#x27;t benefit significantly, that will be a sad story.

Yes, again above the high end of that. Employee ~65 of a startup that raised <i>very</i> little money and IPO&#x27;d for over $1BN (over ten years ago now though ... )

The first startup I worked for, back in the Ancient Days Of The Web, gave me (employee #4, 5, or 6, depending on which of the three of us walked in the door first) options that would have netted me low seven figures when the company was gobbled up in the first bubble. Would have, had I exercised those options before I quit the place and let them expire. So it goes.<p>The second time I had equity was a few years later, joining a much larger company shortly before a terribly botched IPO. The next morning the CEO parked his new Ferrari right next to the employee entrance; the rest of us were stuck with a strike price well above the current valuation. My options eventually peaked out at ~$300K value, but were underwater for years; in theory I could have made far more just buying the stock like any old yutz off the street, if I&#x27;d had any expectation that the company would recover, which I didn&#x27;t.<p>The third time, well, ask me again in a couple years and we&#x27;ll see how it turns out. It&#x27;d be nice, of course, but I&#x27;m not counting on it.<p>My advice: * Be an early employee, preferably during a bubble. (Now is probably good.) * Exercise your options. * Never park your shiny new sports car where your employees can see it.

I used to work for Yahoo M&amp;A (hence the throwaway account). When we did the acquisitions under Marissa we valued the engineers at around $1M each. Most acquihires ended up getting $1M+ vested over 3-4 years. I&#x27;m no longer there.

Throwaway account.<p>Our start-up was acquired by famous bigco after 2 years. ~20 of us were in the company. Every single person is making &gt;$500K, 16 of 20 are making &gt;$1.5M, and 7 of 20 are making &gt;$2M. The founders likely made much more.<p>Few things to note: - The team didn&#x27;t take big salary cuts to join the start-up - salaries were pretty much in line with large companies - Most people were at start-up for less than 1 year when acquired - Four years needed to get the full payout at bigco<p>Although salaries were fine, the employee equity made all the difference on a good-&gt;great outcome. The start-up was enterprise focused, and built innovative, new technology. The team worked really hard and was focused.<p>Pretty much beat all my university classmates on outcome including the ones that joined Google&#x2F;Facebook&#x2F;etc.

Dell bought ConvergeNet, which made a fibre-channel virtual storage device. At the time their stock price was &gt;$50. By the time I could sell, it was half that. So I didn&#x27;t &#x27;take home&#x27; as much as I&#x27;d have liked to. But on paper it looked good for a while.

I&#x27;m 24 now and made $900 pretax in FB (no college loans).<p>I think i&#x27;m lucky that i joined Facebook after IPO but when the stock was very low. My new grad offer was $280k (negotiated like a VC with tons of counter offers from GOOG, DropBox, etc...) and stock was $19 the day i had joined around Sep 2012. So, i got ~14000 FB shares. I sold all my vested shares(~11000 [9500 vested on my base offer and 1500 out of my refresher grants over last 2 years) at $80 very recently and leaving the company for $1M offer with a startup.<p>Total Money i made pre-tax: $900k. Bought a Porsche and chilling out in LA for a month now before my next gig. Everyone call me as a lucky kid.

I joined an enterprise data storage company in the Bay Area in 2012 about 2 years before IPO as a software engineer. Company went IPO in late 2013 and total value of initial grant over 4 years is currently around $800k.

My first startup job put me barely at the beginning of the range you&#x27;re talking about. Honestly I thought we could have made it further on our own but I didn&#x27;t really have much of a choice, but in retrospect it probably was the best thing we could have done for ourselves and our other employees.<p>I guess the working hard for 5-10 years bit and taking it easy for the rest of your life is fine and all, but I think I would go insane if I didn&#x27;t have work to do.

I did a blog post about that: <a href="http://2pasc.com/2012/05/18/the-power-law-of-startup-employees/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;2pasc.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;05&#x2F;18&#x2F;the-power-law-of-startup-employe...</a><p>Overall - it depends when you get in, and its valuation potential at exit. Companies with 10B-100B+ exits can create hundreds to thousands of millionaires. Companies that exit at 200-500M, much less, obviously!

The first startup I worked for, after taxes, made me over 1m and I was employee 42.

The average engineer who joined square about 3 years ago has made more than 2M

a lot of top engineers are understandably going ot be risk-averse about taking low-salary for equity in a company that most likely will not work out... this however is not good for vc firms, because for their investments to work out they need to be able to hire the best hackers (away from places like google and facebook) . this makes me thikn there might be value in vc firms having hackers on their books, hired guns if you will. where the hacker gets a stable income from the vc firm and multiple attempts at joining different start-ups.. across each individual hackers&#x27; 2&#x2F;3 attempts annd the portfolio of hackers,,,, the massive ten million dollar options could be spread around a bit more, to make it more attractive for top hackers to take the risk and join a start-up<p>crucially this would also allow investors to take some of the sunk cost risk out of funding a start-up which is the employees wages..

I was an employee #15-30 range of a small startup and got around $200k out of options and $1.3M of additional RSU upon acquisition. I&#x27;ve more or less kept all of my equity. Because the parent company did well, they&#x27;re currently worth roughly $2.5M post tax (and I&#x27;m hoping the parent company continues to do well).

It&#x27;s a good question. My bias is that it often does not, and that the current investors make sure it does not. However, it also isn&#x27;t in people&#x27;s interest to advertise that they have a lot of money suddenly, so I&#x27;m not sure we&#x27;ll see some good answers here.

Yes, I joined a company fairly late in its history (just two years before its IPO), ended up in the lower end of that range, despite doing nearly everything wrong from financial POV: stayed for roughly 3 years (didn&#x27;t fully vest the initial grant), sold large portion of the stock right after the lock-up expired, and so on.<p>I know plenty of other folks with similar stories: they also joined a mid-sized, yet fast-growing (in terms of both company size and revenue) private companies, ended up doing well financially.<p>There&#x27;s a catch, however: this isn&#x27;t a &quot;get rich quick&quot; scheme, in fact neither myself nor any of the people I know made the decisions they did _for the sake of money_: my own choice had more to do with interesting work, great team, applying my skills at greater scale, and so forth. Lot of folks told me that joining said company was &quot;just too late&quot;; I also considered it as such (thinking of options -- if they were to become worth anything -- as a nice potential bonus, but not a life-changing event).<p>I don&#x27;t like giving advice, but here are some heuristics (YMMV, none of this is universal):<p>1) Don&#x27;t treat equity so cynically as to never take an offer that offers slightly lower title&#x2F;salary&#x2F;etc... vs. the others _especially_ if there are other great reasons to take the &quot;lower title&#x2F;base pay, but higher equity&quot; offer.<p>2) On the other hand, don&#x27;t over-optimize for equity such that one ends up with high percentage of equity but of little or overall negative value. This value can be financial (simply put, if a company is less generous with equity it means they think it&#x27;s worth _something_), but more importantly it can be in terms of missed learning and growth opportunities. I hate to jump on the &quot;too many SELECT ajax FROM php startups&quot; bandwagon -- I happen to work for one that is _very far from that, and yes we&#x27;re hiring! -- but there are plenty of startups that don&#x27;t offer much technical depth, or (for non-technical-folks) don&#x27;t do anything terribly interesting business-wise, either.<p>3) The two anti-patterns I&#x27;ve seen in Silicon Valley are folks _never_ working in smaller teams AND folks trying to get in &quot;as early as possible&quot; for the sake of... &quot;getting in as early as possible&quot; (treating all startups interchangeably, etc...). Good people and interesting work can be found in companies of _any_ size: don&#x27;t pass up these opportunities just because the company seems to be too bi _or_ too small. In the end, the compensation (not just financial&#x2F;equity, but also choice of projects&#x2F;responsibilities) company N+1 will offer will depend on what you can bring to the table, which in turn depends on what you&#x27;ve learned at companies {0,..., N}

I&#x27;ve known multiple &quot;employees&quot; who have gotten 10X that.<p>Some of the stories:<p>- In 3 years before a big IPO to turn around sales at a non-tech company.<p>- A few 10x (100x?) engineers who joined Apple around 2000 and 2001, sticking around for the long ride up.<p>- Junior Engineer (~Employee #30) at a big ERP company that had a massive IPO a few years later.<p>In most of the cases they were expecting &quot;new house&quot; money rather than &quot;new life&quot; money. In all the cases, they are still doing roughly the same jobs before the windfall. In all but the last case they were very talented workaholics surrounded by similar minded folks. Of course they also lucked into the right opportunity.

I&#x27;ve worked for startups and for public companies. All of my equity success (into and past your range) has come from my stock options in the public companies I have worked for. The startups have netted me exactly 0 thus far (but the jury is still out).

Just accepted an offer of $150k base and $1M in stock options from one of hot startups in SF. I will update here if the startup makes it to IPO in next few years and i made real money more than $500k and stock market does not crash in 2016.

This post may benefit from having &#x27;Ask HN:&#x27; in the title.

Can we count being paper millionaires for a while?

Seems there would be work for a clued up lawyer to advise early hires on their employment contracts. Do such people exist?

Microsoft was an example where it&#x27;s owners became billionaires and they&#x27;re employees became millionaires.

Well, its a company that its fashionable to hate on on ycombinator, but <a href="http://gizmodo.com/5019527/bill-gates-made-men-the-wild-n-crazy-ventures-of-the-microsoft-millionaires" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gizmodo.com&#x2F;5019527&#x2F;bill-gates-made-men-the-wild-n-cr...</a>

I notice all the answers so far are in the US. Any UK or Australia stories to keep my hope up?<p>Interesting to see 250k is a realistic salary for a developer as well. I never see any jobs anywhere near that in the UK or Australia - except maybe London as a contract developer in finance.

I know of a couple, but it&#x27;s rare. You&#x27;re much more likely to make money in a hedge fund. Year-end bonuses (profit-sharing) are a much better model, at least for employees, than startup equity, which is usually a retention carrot for after the company is bought and dies. Unless you become an executive, you have to get very lucky to have that kind of outcome.<p>The million-dollar houses are mostly being bought by investors and well-connected career startup executives who take almost no risk. Engineers are renters in the Valley.