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.
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.