When FANGs all went public, there was an explosion of millionaires in Silicon Valley. Today, you have companies going public (eg snapchat) that aren’t really profitable and those employees with stock grants and restriction periods, they end up with a lot less money than the valuation of their shares as of the last Series round of funding. Basically, my view of the golden age of becoming very wealthy from being a tech worker has passed. You’ll still make solid coin, but you won’t be as wealthy as Facebook’s 50th employee is.
inflation would help with that
lol
think about how your 0.5% after the series a will look after the series g and the subsequent ipo at 2 billion
Which is ?
assuming 25% dilution every round you’re looking at 1.7 mil. assuming your company is one of the few that make it
Eh, I think you are too focused on the recent glut. Instagram would have been huge but they sold out, Snapchat could still get huge if their CEO didn't suck, uber, Lyft and Airbnb are probably going to mint a bunch of millionaires when they ipo.
Lyft is still unprofitable tho.
Yeah these people’s stock grants will not be worth as much as Lyft said once they become liquid
FAANGs are still minting millionaires. High comp plus RSU appreciation will get you there, and do so more reliably.
Yep, even non faang got me there after 13 years or so. Slow and steady, ride the compound interest boys.
Less upside though. FANGs were minting multimillionaires at IPO. Base compensation is higher today, but there is less upside potential.
It has nothing to do with the valley though, it's the entire field that is drying up
400k TC and it’s drying up? Jesus H Christ
You were not around during the dot com bubble, weren't you?
You mean "millionaires" in the "actually really wealthy people" sense retained from a few decades ago and not the literal $1mm net worth sense, right? Because the tech industry is minting more literal millionaires than it ever did before and at the rate we're going that's going to be table stakes to pay rent on your studio in some places. My parents would gawk at my salary being five or six times higher than theirs ever was, but what they would conveniently forget is that my house was about 15 times more expensive.
Correct. I was loosely applying the term. I meant more so the fact that, a decade ago, you’d have a company like FB go public and now there’s thousands of new multi millionaires. Today you join fang and yes the pay is very good, but it has limited upside. The 500k In RSUs might double in 4 years but you aren’t going to have this massive liquidity event and go from being worth peanuts to say 5M or more like when the FANGs IPOed.
Most folks would prefer the stable 350k-500k TC offers for Senior Engineers from FAANG than an uncertain potential ‘millions’ from a startup. Sure, your current house might look worse than a janitor’s house in Texas, but in under 10 years you can save enough to retire in half of the world.
+1 to fat pumpkin dude. A million bucks doesn’t mean what it used to. Billions are the new millions.
“Billions are the new millions”........no, multi million is the new million. Billion is still billion.
I think the best equivalent to what $1mm was is now $10mm. It's not the unfathomable amount of money that allows you to independently influence society the way billions is, but it's enough to be freed of any day-to-day concerns about money with a modicum of good sense and reasonable standards. "Decamilllionaire" just isn't as catchy, though.
There's been a shift over the last 10 years where founders and investors, either directly or through dilution, keep significantly larger chunks of equity. This in itself has reduced the opportunity for the rank and file to become FU rich at IPOs. E.g when Lyft's valuation went up by 100% recently, employees only saw a 40% increase in their stock prices as the rest of the increase went to dilution. My employer's stock price hasn't gone up since 2015 even though we raised a G round last year. All of the valuation increase their (+1.3B) went to investors. And at this rate, we'll need to IPO for about 20% over our current valuation just to keep the stock price flat.
You’ll probably IPO at +20% and still have a +30% pop in stock on the first day. So enjoy!
That's why you guys are given those 900k shares of paper money, it will be diluted.
Microsoft minted a lot of millionaires in the '90s. After the dot com bustbit was felt like those days were over. Then Google and Facebook happened. There will be others in the future.
What would you have to say about the post immediately prior to yours in this thread? Investors and founders are hoarding the equity unlike the 90s and 00s
I don't know how the future millionaires will be minted just like I couldn't see the value in joining Google shortly before their IPO but I'm fairly confident that it will happen.
The center of gravity has already moved from su’s to overperforming co’s; rsu’s are a slower but surer way of getting there.
What's su and co?
Start up and company?