Face value compensation at the top tech companies is generally much higher than what you would get at a startup. Have a look at https://levels.fyi
It’s more complicated than that. Some top startups (e.g. Stripe, Airtable, Databricks, Scale AI, ByteDance, Benchling, and several others) pay at least as much or a lot more than e.g. Google/Meta. Some of those (Stripe, Airtable, Scale AI) seem to offer new grads close to $100k more than Google does on average in the first year (counting signing bonuses, and assuming the valuation of all of those companies doesn’t change). Also, Levels.fyi’s 2020 report showed that a lot of the top-paying companies were startups.
But it is probably the case that startups with more room for growth pay much less.
Now I’m just confused about what companies were talking about! Stripe is 12 years old, has 4k people, and is worth ~$100B. Is it just that it is still private?
I would have counted it as a big company and not a startup in thinking about this post, but maybe that’s not how the author intended it?
I would have counted it as a big company and not a startup in thinking about this post, but maybe that’s not how the author intended it?
I thought Stripe would be in the reference class of startups (since it still raises money from VCs), until I read Michael Dickens’s reply to this comment. I agree that it was a supremely bad example, though. The other companies I mentioned probably count?
There are also a lot of smaller/newer companies that pay about as much as Google/Meta that I didn’t mention in my first comment. They’re mostly unicorns (though not all of them are), but I think they might be a substantial fraction of the set of companies people actively trying to work at startups might end up in—they’re large compared to the average startup, but the average startup is less likely to have the necessary infrastructure to absorb more people or recruit in a predictable way, and/or might hire exclusively from its personal networks.
It’s more complicated than that. Some top startups (e.g. Stripe, Airtable, Databricks, Scale AI, ByteDance, Benchling, and several others) pay at least as much or a lot more than e.g. Google/Meta. Some of those (Stripe, Airtable, Scale AI) seem to offer new grads close to $100k more than Google does on average in the first year (counting signing bonuses, and assuming the valuation of all of those companies doesn’t change). Also, Levels.fyi’s 2020 report showed that a lot of the top-paying companies were startups.
But it is probably the case that startups with more room for growth pay much less.
Now I’m just confused about what companies were talking about! Stripe is 12 years old, has 4k people, and is worth ~$100B. Is it just that it is still private?
I would have counted it as a big company and not a startup in thinking about this post, but maybe that’s not how the author intended it?
I would not consider Stripe a startup for the purposes of this post.
I thought Stripe would be in the reference class of startups (since it still raises money from VCs), until I read Michael Dickens’s reply to this comment. I agree that it was a supremely bad example, though. The other companies I mentioned probably count?
There are also a lot of smaller/newer companies that pay about as much as Google/Meta that I didn’t mention in my first comment. They’re mostly unicorns (though not all of them are), but I think they might be a substantial fraction of the set of companies people actively trying to work at startups might end up in—they’re large compared to the average startup, but the average startup is less likely to have the necessary infrastructure to absorb more people or recruit in a predictable way, and/or might hire exclusively from its personal networks.