And there are several billion stories of wages not making people rich.
Beware the availability bias here. Nobody tells their story of working for salary all their life and not getting rich because that's not newsworthy. It is news when people work at a promising startup for equity, but it fails. So people fall victim to the bias of thinking there's more of a problem with equity than wages, because that's the failure case they hear about more often.
The risk of not getting rich from wages is 99.9% (number of 9s depending on your definition of rich). The risk of not getting rich from equity in a series of promising startups over a career, can be less than 50%.
It's a bit of an unfair comparison. Usually the certain kind of people that have what it takes (however likely it may be) to "get rich" from their sweat equity are also likely to command very high salaries at top companies (in tech or investment banking). The former is a much riskier proposition, of course, and the end result might have looked similar when you take in account dilution and the like.
As a founder, that dynamic completely changes, of course.
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And there are several billion stories of wages not making people rich.
Beware the availability bias here. Nobody tells their story of working for salary all their life and not getting rich because that's not newsworthy. It is news when people work at a promising startup for equity, but it fails. So people fall victim to the bias of thinking there's more of a problem with equity than wages, because that's the failure case they hear about more often.
The risk of not getting rich from wages is 99.9% (number of 9s depending on your definition of rich). The risk of not getting rich from equity in a series of promising startups over a career, can be less than 50%.
It's a bit of an unfair comparison. Usually the certain kind of people that have what it takes (however likely it may be) to "get rich" from their sweat equity are also likely to command very high salaries at top companies (in tech or investment banking). The former is a much riskier proposition, of course, and the end result might have looked similar when you take in account dilution and the like.
As a founder, that dynamic completely changes, of course.
I'm not normally a pedant... but... it can be also more than 99% and it can also be less than 1%...
So I'm not really sure what that brings to the discussion! :)