I&#x27;ve done both - 3 years as an employee across two different startups, 18 months as a founder, 5.5 years at Google, and now 18 months as a founder.  I guess I&#x27;m quoted in the article too. :-)<p>All I can say is that the market is actually a lot more efficient than most people give it credit for.  I remember coming out of school and thinking &quot;Why would anyone work for a big company when the payouts for startups are so much better?&quot;  After a bunch of experience, I&#x27;ve found that:<p>1. Those big startup payouts are much rarer than a typical new grad conceives.  They&#x27;re also more widely distributed: perception is that startups are &quot;go big or go home&quot;, but a number of companies end in talent acquisitions that are just slightly less or more than what the founders would&#x27;ve earned at a big company.<p>2. Compensation at big companies varies wildly, and people with the effort &amp; effectiveness levels that you&#x27;d expect from a startup often are actually making startup-level money.  There is <i>zero</i> reason for anyone doing this to publicize that fact, and oftentimes they&#x27;re contractually forbidden from disclosing it.<p>For people trying to decide between these - forget about the financial rewards and ask yourself &quot;What would you like your working life to be like?&quot;  I&#x27;d also forget the common wisdom about startups = no life &amp; big companies = drudging pace; both of these are inaccurate on a micro-level, and you can find startups that prioritize work-life balance or teams within a big company where everyone&#x27;s life revolves around work.<p>Instead, think about the problems you would like to solve.  Do you want to do cutting edge research that pushes humanity&#x27;s knowledge forwards?  Work for a research lab or big company&#x27;s research department.  Do you want to bring new technologies to the masses?  Then you want a startup, probably one that has spun out of a major university with a couple professors as founders.  Do you want to put social hacks in motion and bring technology to ordinary lives?  That&#x27;s probably also a startup, probably one with young founders.  Do you want to scale technologies and work with big data or machine learning?  Big company; startups usually lack ownership of enough data, unless they&#x27;re a consultancy.  Do you want to apply technology to an industry that currently does things backwardly?  Join a startup whose founders have significant domain knowledge in that industry.<p>If you work on problems that you believe in, you&#x27;ll find that you&#x27;re much more effective at solving them.  The financial rewards follow after that; money is a lagging indicator for value generated, not a leading one.