The total comp from a big tech company is 2-3x what any startup will provide. The risk is from missing out on a big payout if there isn't an exit (and having to wait ~5 years to see that) vs. the guaranteed extra income from vesting RSUs.
This. I put 16 years into 3 startups. All were small (< 200 people), and I was VP Eng at the last one. Two were sold and one is still chugging along with no real growth left, but a nice business. Net value of my equity in all of those was -$500. My salary as a VP was $185k, which was about what my next company paid grads fresh out of school (salary, bonus, stock). At that gig, my initial offer was 2.5x my startup comp, and with stock appreciation, I was making close to 3.5x. In the following gig, that jumped to 4.5x.
While I loved my startup time, learned so much doing it, and wouldn't change anything about it, at this point in my life with a mortgage and teenager, I'd realistically need a startup to be able to at least 10-20x for the risk to be worth the opportunity cost of missing $BIGCO$ salary.
This might be true in the US, but not true in the EU (Zurich and London are not in the EU). I'm currently in the process of switching from Google to a startup, at the moment.
