> If the startup is offering a fair market salary

In that case, yes. But that's definitely not the way quite a few of those pitches go. It's more like: take this below market salary and this tiny bit of equity which will surely be worth more one day than the salary that you're foregoing today.

Of course it takes two to tango and you're free not to believe that spiel but I've seen it more than once in my own career.

I interviewed with around 20 startups in the Valley about a year and a half ago. Hands down every single startup that made me an offer had a shit salary.

After I ditched the idea of working in the Valley based on my experience interviewing there I decided to focus my search on distributed teams only.

What I found was surprising. Not only were these new startups outside the Valley offering remote work but almost all had higher salaries. It was crazy. Here I was thinking that the only way I could earn a high paying wage was to live in one the most expensive cities in the world. Little did I know that I could earn a market salary and live anywhere.

If I could give anyone advice about finding a new job at a startup it would be to seek out companies offering remote work. It's the only way to go.

What kind of skillset do you have though?

Here on HN there has been constant bemoaning over difficulty of finding good remote work.

The biggest issue has been that remote work pretty much requires living in low cost of living locations.

I mostly brand myself as a Product Designer. That job typically requires a decent knowledge of both design and development. As far as me specifically: UI, UX, CSS/SASS/HTML/JS, Rails & Ruby, Design tools like sketch and CC and some working knowledge of iOS development.