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't fully vest the initial grant), sold large portion of the stock right after the lock-up expired, and so on.
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.
There's a catch, however: this isn't a "get rich quick" 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 "just too late"; 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).
I don't like giving advice, but here are some heuristics (YMMV, none of this is universal):
1) Don't treat equity so cynically as to never take an offer that offers slightly lower title/salary/etc... vs. the others _especially_ if there are other great reasons to take the "lower title/base pay, but higher equity" offer.
2) On the other hand, don'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's worth _something_), but more importantly it can be in terms of missed learning and growth opportunities. I hate to jump on the "too many SELECT ajax FROM php startups" bandwagon -- I happen to work for one that is _very far from that, and yes we're hiring! -- but there are plenty of startups that don't offer much technical depth, or (for non-technical-folks) don't do anything terribly interesting business-wise, either.
3) The two anti-patterns I've seen in Silicon Valley are folks _never_ working in smaller teams AND folks trying to get in "as early as possible" for the sake of... "getting in as early as possible" (treating all startups interchangeably, etc...). Good people and interesting work can be found in companies of _any_ size: don'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/equity, but also choice of projects/responsibilities) company N+1 will offer will depend on what you can bring to the table, which in turn depends on what you've learned at companies {0,..., N}