Most do not become wealthy or even approximate “rich.”
Most are simply made whole after years of being underpaid.
Looking at successful exits (the ones you hear about) as your indicator of the market state is lopsided and inaccurate. I have one friend who did well in an exit. I have countless other friends who have been in and out of startups that either fail, get rolled into another company with little/no cash landing in their pockets, or get acquired for a pittance.
You are looking at the Michael Jordans and Kobe Bryants and deciding that everyone can win big in basketball.
I have a very different experience. And so do many of my friends.
Again there’s always winners and losers. I didn’t say everyone is a winner. But the odds are no where near “random lottery odds” especially if you aren’t just randomly picking a company to work for and have a clue why the company could be successful.
Snap, AirBnB, Stripe, FB, Tesla (though TSLA is kind of a weird exception in lots of ways) - it isn't that hard to see which companies are rocket ships in early growth. If you can get a seat on one even as employee 500 you'll probably do pretty well.
Yes there's risk, but the odds aren't lottery odds and it does a disservice to inexperienced people that don't understand what's true to pretend this is the case.
You also get to make this bet a few times if you're good at interviewing and willing to jump around every four years or so to a new place (something I haven't done, but I've seen people do).
Professional investors struggle to make good investment decisions after years of intense practice, and many many investment decisions.
Why do you think naive employees can pick winners? Clearly the vast majority don't or can't...
The only difference is that an employee might get in on a hot deal where many investors are chasing one great looking deal and most investors will miss out.
I suspect it's because a lot of investors don't know what they're doing and are further removed from the details.
The good ones (of which there are few) have hands on experience as founders or a deep understanding of the industry and personal technical experience. Employees don't have to be naive, they're on the ground with an understanding of the technology and are likely to see first hand what works and what doesn't.
Obviously not everyone will succeed, but there's no reason employees can't do a better job than investors (and many do).
So you feel like your circle of friends is good at picking which startups will have a financially successful exit? If true, you should be a VC and not a lowly tech worker ;)
Tell them what? That if they had invested part of their huge six figure salaries into a diversity of tech stocks over the past several years they could have been actual millionaires by now instead of waiting this long for some IPO sitting on bubbly valuations that could pop in an instant?
you assume no one is putting part of their base salary and cash bonus in the stock like any other person would. of course they are. just because the equity portion of your comp is illiquid vs someone else doesn’t mean you don’t have the means to save and invest.
The comparison is being drawn between employees who joined say google, amazon, or netflix - and those who joined startups. The employees at the public company benefit in negotiations with the employer by having price transparency on the value of their equity as well as liquidity.
You could work for Facebook, but think Apple is a better bet and sell your equity every month to buy apple shares. Most startup employees overvalue their equity and accept lower total compensation compared to their public company counterparts and receive illiquid or potentially even negative value financial instruments in return.
