I was the 7th hire at a YC start-up which is now worth at least $1bn. I negotiated 2% of the stock in exchange for a 60% discount in salary, and an understanding that my work would primarily be evangelism/marketing, as I was burned out on engineering and just didn't want to be a sysadmin/devops/whatever anymore.

Anyways, I signed our two biggest customers, organized our tradeshows, did some tech work, and protected one of our employees from assault at a conference.

When I'd been there for 3 months, in the midst of a conference (where we were kicking butt, by the way), most of AWS went down and we scrambled to figure out what to do.

When I got back from the conference I was fired without severance. After I let them know I'd be speaking to the customers I'd signed, and that three of the engineers in their hiring pipeline were friends of mine, they came back with a "generous" offer of 2 weeks severance.

The funny thing, is they were really nice kids, and I do mean kids, they were children. I'm quite sure they used this as an opportunity to get rid of me because Paul or some other greedmonger at YC ordered them to screw me over so that they could sell more stock to investors later.

After that point, it hasn't mattered if I work for a start-up or a big company. YC taught me that all companies are the same, and now I just view myself as a mercenary.

It doesn't matter where you work, how much they lie to you about "culture" and "family", or how much they try to convince you that you should take a salary discount because "your stock will be yuuuuuuge and we're changing the world", or "this is a greenfield environment with a chance to do something entirely new" (it isn't. all start-ups are really just rip-offs of other start-ups. )

Your main response to every sales pitch they give you should be, "fck you, pay me".

Repeat it, memorize it, live by it. Fck you, pay me.

"This kinda shit happens all the time. You gotta get yours, but fool I gotta get mine" -- Snoop Dogg.