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.I know several people who took home much more from employee roles (albeit in larger acquisitions) in the recent past.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).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.