This is me. I work at a FAANG, about half of my very good compensation is in RSUs. All the startup companies I've talked to (I don't turn down recruiters out of hand) seem to like my skill set, but cannot really meet my comp requirements without valuing options as if they were 100% guaranteed to convert at the current high valuation.
It's a bummer - startups do a lot of really cool stuff, but I'm at a point in my career where I can no longer really gamble that the options will pay out. I need the stability and mortgage paying power of actual comp.
I wouldn’t discount startups altogether. I was previously at a FANG company when a startup doing some exciting work in a really interesting space offered to match my total comp in cash, plus the equivalent in options based on their recent valuation. All fully remote.
At the time, the company I was at seemed to be going downhill quickly, and they began mass layoffs for the first time shortly after I left.
What happened since then? Well, the startup options have very likely gone to zero. And my previous company’s stock price, which had been dropping quickly over the course of my last year there, made a hard U-turn right after I left and has been skyrocketing ever since (my family likes to joke that I caused the change of course at both companies).
Was it really a bad decision though? It’s sort of hard to tell. At my previous company, my manager had put together a promotion packet, but this likely would have been cancelled with the layoffs, and there’s a chance I could have been laid off as well (as far as I can tell it was random). And then there’s the fact that for whatever weird reason, compensation for internal promos at this company heavily lagged that of external hires at the same level for many years.
So at least up until now, I think I am even with or maybe slightly ahead of the counterfactual situation where I didn’t join a startup. Plus I have had new experiences, greater scope, and different types of challenges than I had previously, and I think it’s valuable to have a variety of novel experiences over a lifetime.
Obviously, from this point forward my future (financial) outlook would be better off if I had stayed, but it’s hard to write off my decision to try something new. Other former coworkers also left to join startups, a few of which are likely to go public soon, so it’s not as if going from FANG to a startup always works out unfavorably, and if you join a startup that seems to be doing well at a later stage, the downside risk doesn’t seem that high actually.
This is somewhere the reality distortion field hits hard. I have even heard "we are about to raise at an $X valuation, we'll offer you options at that price." When you sit them down and explain that those investors are getting preferred shares, which have some measure of protection against bankruptcy, and that the common stock is not worth nearly that much without the insurance, it (in my experience) enrages startup people. Many of them won't show their cap table or even discuss their past fundraising terms.
It's a bummer - startups do a lot of really cool stuff, but I'm at a point in my career where I can no longer really gamble that the options will pay out. I need the stability and mortgage paying power of actual comp.