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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Senior staff/E7 level at FAANG will get you that comp, especially with stock appreciation if you've been there for a while.
What does someone at Senior staff/E7 level do?
My day to day work is around planning, coding, and system design.
The strongest case for startup equity as compensation is made by Ben Kuhn, in my opinion, and it amounts to: you can diversify your equity exposure in more companies than you could as an angel because (i) the best companies will want to hire you and (ii) you can quit your company as soon as it appears to not be a rocketship, something you'll have insider knowledge of. https://www.benkuhn.net/optopt/
Do the math.
In just about every case, you're rolling dice for what? A faster paced environment and sleepless nights?
I get it, the hedonic treadmill is real. Happiness isn't bought with money, but couldn't you just save enough money to semi-retire and do something different at that point?
I suppose the other way to look at it is if your'e making $1M/year now, and living anywhere close to like a "normal" person, you have put enough away in the bank/investments that now you can easily afford to do whatever you want without worrying about money, without getting paid at all. You are in the position where you can choose what you want to do, with the money not even being an issue. So why even worry about th…
I have enough that would not be a problem if I made 20% of what I make today, but I don't have enough that money would never be an issue.
I'm not trying to optimize for money, but I'm not going to ignore it. From what I'm getting from this thread is probably be a founder might be a better fit for me rather than a startup employee.
You have gotten to where you are by being highly-capable and applying yourself consistently. You have the personal skills and financial leverage to bring about many things in this world. What do you want to build? What needs nurturing the most? What, if any, legacy would I like to leave behind?
I believe we are in early days of a century of revolution. Pick your battle and fight it. The money will follow if your work continues to create value.
Besides that personal take, it seems like you may not have to make a breaking change. I always try to ask myself "why not both?". Given you're in the tech ecosystem, you probably have an information advantage on what startup investing opportunities exist and which may be viable. There is nothing stopping you from being a part-time angel investor and generating passive income. Certainly you have to source and work deals, but its generally a lot more passive to be a semi-silent partner than one who does it full-time, and as long as you go in with talented investors who want to take a more active role you can be somewhat assured your investment will be shepherded well. Should you find your investment(s) have traction and you feel you can add value with your specific skills, it may make sense to join the team. You can do so while being reasonably assured that you'll average $80K+ / month as a baseline, while also virtually guaranteeing things will be a bit more interesting day to day.
Best of luck to you.
So it depends on what you want.
Startups offer flexibility, opportunity to shape a company and its culture, building a team, incredibly fast growth (both personal and company), and the opportunity to touch many-if-not-all parts of the company.
The downsides are lower comp, longer hours (if you’re actually going to see returns), less support. For engineering, for example, big company employees drastically underestimate how much they rely on homegrown tooling.
Whether that’s worth it to you isn’t something I can answer. You will make less money. Probably a lot less. There are things you get that might be worth more than money, especially when you already have a lot. But also maybe they’re not to you and that’s okay!
> I make around $0.9M-$1.2M per year today Wow, can I ask how you make that much per year? I am not in that position but to me it sounds like you should not go with the startup. The chance of failure is very high EDIT: One thing I thought you go do is invest in startups. That way you're into the startup world with less risk.
Senior staff/E7 level at FAANG will get you that comp, especially with stock appreciation if you've been there for a while.
My suggestion (which if I had not made financial mistakes in years past I would be doing now) is building my own personal accelerator - basically decide on a stack, find five cool ideas (with some audience) and build the products with at least one co-founder for each idea. When one idea completely misses kill it quick and pluck a new one out. Spread the risk of one idea failing like VCs do but keep most of the upside…