Over the past few years, I've talked to numerous early-stage startups of various kinds and all of them were making offers where the valuation would have to be 10-20 times their seed round valuation - which is already inflated, due to liquidity preference if you're merely taking RSU/options - for me to break even. And rarely was there significant sweat equity, nor were the founders' background substantially better than mine in any of those cases. If the potential for those startups was so great as to make their offers for early employees fair, they were essentially paying themselves millions a year, assuming most of the founders' equity was also being vested. And looking back, none of them found any kind of success where I would've come even close to breaking even.

I'm at a point where doing my own startup is beginning to look attractive and this is a concern - would my investors force me to make these types of offers to early employees? What kind of employees would I be able to attract with that? Is this just entirely about attracting anti-big company people, delusional true believers or those who have no shot at getting a decent offer elsewhere?

Btw, I've worked at startups, small companies and big companies and I don't buy that the rate of learning is higher at a small startup. At a big tech company, junior engineers already work on very large, complex problems and have tons of great people to learn from. As an engineer, there's no shortage of opportunities to learn. What can be potentially higher at a smaller company is the rate of career growth - if you're at a company that is growing at a crazy rate, you can become a somebody and have large managerial responsibilities quicker because being an early employee and having those relationships and foundational knowledge give you an advantage even over outsiders who would otherwise be more qualified. But even this is probably overstated at this point if you're not a founder, since tech culture is much more fungible than they used to be and nowadays everyone feels much more comfortable hiring experienced external managers over promoting internally those that aren't quite ready.