Any stories of employees with equity successfully taking home over $1m? $500k?
Yes, my first startup job got me into the high end of that range, as employee #5, with a relatively small acquisition.<p>I know several people who took home much more from employee roles (albeit in larger acquisitions) in the recent past.<p>A lot of it has to do with who you work with. In every case I can think of, windfall money for employees came from founders with a track record of accomplishing that (or, in my case, a founder who would soon develop that track record, and was, in the company I was at, extremely committed to making sure his team was well compensated at liquidity).<p>This is one of the reasons I don't love Paul Graham's hacker startup thesis, about working very hard for 5-10 years so you can take it easy for the rest of your life. There are a lot of problems with that idea, but one of them is that it generates a lot of loss aversion instinct for founders.