Sun or otherwise it’s not the beginning of his career. I don’t mean they are billionaires but I’m willing to bet they don’t need to collect cash to pay downpayment like an average Google L4 on their first starter townhouse in Sunnyvale which will get more expensive while they receive their 200ks, so yeah I know exactly what I’m talking about. He knows very well too.
Are you... actually willing to bet? Because I would take the other side of that bet. But please, let's make it meaningful: I still have a mortgage to pay and college-aged kids!
I guess you've basically proven my point, although it appears I may have been poorly communicating it as if I meant you can afford a yacht or not, which I would certainly think would be deserved, but none of my business to comment on: you have a house/mortgage and your kids are now grown to college aged, but for someone who's not had as long of a career, the low-variance compensation means they have fewer opportunities to get ahead by trying harder and totally bound by equity performance [which actually does vary quite a lot, I'd suspect] so the risk-reward of a flat-comp startup generally favors the more established players in the labor market, unless the amount is somewhat above the range of the base salary they'd command elsewhere (which is the case with cash-rich players like OpenAI).
Frankly, when you look around and everyone around you is focused first and foremost on getting rich, that's a good indication that the rich veins have already been mined.
Wealth is built on creating something of value. There is gamesmanship played to acquire that value once it is created, but without the thing itself they are all just picking each others' pockets.
I don't work at Oxide but I have done an Emeryville <-> Sunnyvale commute, so I can confirm that Oxide employees almost certainly do not want to deal with that