If you were asking these questions to a 10-50 person company, would it matter if they answered everything truthfully? All equity comp is lottery ticket in private companies.
I know people in listed companies, large, old ones, who were bitten quite badly by the stock going down. Treating everything besides your base cash pay as a bonus that can go to zero is the prudent thing to do.
How many publicly traded old companies had illiquid stocks that you couldn’t sell for something when they vested - especially tech stocks? Yes I know about Enron. But that was both an outlier and over a decade ago.
Yes, mine are down about 20% from the time I was awarded them. But at least I can sell them and not hope for an exit event.
I don’t thing employees of FAAMG (not a typo, Netflix was never “Big”Tech with a 1 trillion dollar* market cap) have to worry about their stock going to $0
