Not sure if you mean that seriously, or with tongue in cheek. It takes a very healthy dose of luck and market timing to be successful. Even the VCs, the experts, don't know how to pick winners. They expect a 90% failure rate, and this is among the ones they picked!
As an employee you don't have the same profit structure in play -- you can only work at one startup at a time. You cannot spread your bets around and let that one winner make the math work. You have to be 10x better at selecting a startup than the experts, probably 100x better if you expect to beat a big tech salary.
That all is correct and leads to a very simple conclusion: working for a startup has a very low probability of making you rich. Doesn't mean that people shouldn't do it, but it's better to have healthy expectations.
I still think its good for college grads, gives you a lot of leeway and space to play around with many different hats and find one that fits you better.
Incredibly lousy way to make money though, odds you will hit jackpot are none unless you're one of the founders and even then odds are still small.
If a college grad is choosing between faang and no-name startup, their career will likely go over much better than no-name startup. Having the big name on your resume does wonders. Even for experienced candidates, keep taking the big name. The market rewards it. (Including startups - compensation packages for people with faang resumes usually are better)
YC manages truly incredible returns, and you can just... join those companies after they have gotten the YC seal of approval (or any other signal you like).
Unlike a VC, you do not have to "return the fund", so you are excited about a much wider range of outcomes than just the top outliers, and you are not locked in and can leave.
It is also much easier for an employee to get into a hot startup than an investor.
You also don't have to deploy a certain amount of capital or join a startup if you don't see one that you think will be successful.
Particularly in the b2b space, I think it's quite straight forward to see if the company is doing something valuable or if their idea is dumb and bad.
Of those 10% exits, 50% are acquisitions. Acquisitions are rarely lucrative for rank and file employees. But even at 10%, you need to have a crystal ball as an employee. YC is not an especially strong selector. And unicorn is baseline success these days (the data is from 2025), so we at the 5% level not 10%. Maybe you aren't aware of typical equity grants beyond, say, employee 10. You need at least a unicorn exit to match a big tech salary.
I mean you're right, you don't have to return the fund. You have to match (risk-adjusted) the opportunity cost of a big tech salary. Incredibly hard and luck is the most relevant factor. Meanwhile, if you job hop out of the startup after startup because they mostly go nowhere, your resume quickly becomes uninteresting (ye olde 1 year of experience 5 times problem). So you do have to stick it out.
> idea is dumb and bad.
the idea rarely matters. ideas are free. execution is king.
This is a very cynical read of the data. Most of the companies discussed here are still too early to have an exit.
If you look at the early batches (which are the only ones where all the companies are dead or exited), then more than half of them got to an exit.
And looking at all the companies, only 13% have failed so far, compared to 10% with exits. And failures generally come way before exits, so the data is incredibly biased if not taken on a cohort basis.
I disagree that acquisitions are rarely lucrative. I have been part of several and they have both been good for rank and file (me).
> the idea rarely matters. ideas are free. execution is king.
This is true at the earliest stage where the idea is very fungible. And execution always matters, but there are people out here working on the 50th Travel Booking Assistant who you should not go and work for. If the idea didn't matter, YC wouldn't ask about it.
> your resume quickly becomes uninteresting (ye olde 1 year of experience 5 times problem)
Nobody is forcing you to spend your entire career doing 1 year stints.
As an employee you don't have the same profit structure in play -- you can only work at one startup at a time. You cannot spread your bets around and let that one winner make the math work. You have to be 10x better at selecting a startup than the experts, probably 100x better if you expect to beat a big tech salary.