I don't get the suggestion of not going to startups. I can't predict the future, but how many people got financially free by joining the right startups/blow-out small companies in the past 10 years? There are tens of thousands of opportunities there, and one can further maximize their chance by decisively leaving bad startups. A bonus to one's career is they get to build cool technologies in the successful startups too. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, AWS, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Pinterest, Databricks, Snowflake, Arista, a slew of PLG SaaS companies. That's just the companies that are on top of my mind. Think about the first 500 - 1000 engineers of each company, or hundreds of those who joined the company when the stock price was low. A simple math: say the chance of failing at a top startup is 80% (top companies have lower chance of failures than the average startups), and one stays at a startup for an average of 2 years before landing on a successful one. The chance of failing everyone of them in a 20-year career is 0.8^10 = 10%! And you don't want to take a risk of 10% of failure to be financially free?