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Comment by yourapostasy | Hacker News Reader

> ...at startups as employees, you dont get to see the cap table, so the whole maze is invisible too!

I've never heard it adequately explained why employees should accept this state of affairs. Not only is the cap table invisible, but the fully-diluted cap table and terms of dilution and many other terms and conditions are also hidden from non-founders/investors at most startups I've read about. I've heard so many stories of shares getting diluted right out from under employees immediately before a liquidity event that it has become a trope. IMHO that's not investing into a startup; that's buying a lottery ticket.

What am I missing here about typical startup stock options where the same terms and conditions founders and investors see are not accessible to employees?

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I think I can explain it looking at some of the comments on the similar discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25487130

It is the same as acting and sports -- people look the handful of winners, ignore the field of dropouts, and think they too can become a winner. They see AirBNB and think their startup is the next AirBNB.

Also much like acting and sports, there are a constant stream of new entrants who have not learned the lessons.

I want to be fair here -- I work at a startup and I love it. But I value my equity at zero and nothing more. I chose to work at a startup because I get to do cross-functional work rather than get stuck into a silo of a silo at a large company. I took a significant paycut from a large company salary and a significant upside cut from when I was a founder in exchange for more accelerated learning and exposure to all parts of the company.

> Also much like acting and sports, there are a constant stream of new entrants who have not learned the lessons.

That sounds like the general software startup industry has built their own version of video game industry goggles; glamorize the startup lifestyle and culture so much millions of kids will compete with each other into a race to the bottom. There's probably some succinct German compound word for this dynamic and if there isn't, I hope some German speakers can suggest some here so I can add it to my lexicon.

To be honest, I don’t think most people that have been working for startups for more than fives years even think much about their stock options unless they are like engineer no 1 or 2. And honestly that is often a minimum 10 year commitment so maybe not even then.

There is always the chance you’ll get super lucky, but investors and founders have become experts at extracting the maximum possible portion of the value created. To the point where there isn’t a whole lot left for anyone else. Workers included.

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