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I guess I “won” the lottery working for one of the companies going public but all of these names have been highly visibly for nearly the whole past decade and an option anyone could have considered over a big corporate job.

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If you have known about this company for 10 years and gotten in late your lottery ticket will look like you matched 4 numbers out of 6 with a few extra thousand. But you also took less money over that time so the amount drops.

If you got in before anyone heard of the company it could be a true lottery ticket.

What companies do you know that have been around for 10 years that someone should join today to get the next lottery ticket?

Go to levels.fyi and retroactively give yourself an SDE2 / SDE3 job for the years you worked at the startup, then compare that to the payout someone would have had from working at AirBNB for the last few years. Even if you assume you liquidated all the RSUs as they vested, it's tough to say that the cushy, low-stress $300k+/year FAANG job would've been a bad choice.

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