I like the points and they're totally valid, but I am going to provide some different perspectives on the same matter.

Just quickly on my background: serial entrepreneur, also later worked for venture-backed startups of various sizes. Worked in the startup world for the past 12 years.

The bit about mentorship - Yes, and No.

This is positing an assumption that you can only seek mentorship at your workplace, and also that most help-seeking behavior happen in the workspace.

I can't say both are false, but there are quite a few instances where these assumptions aren't true.

Employees have friends, co-founders have friends - more importantly, being in a startup means finding answers from sources outside the company because if what you're doing is so innovative, chances are no one in the room has the answers.

I have seen former employees who have only worked for startups to become executives and founders of large venture-backed startups, and manage to build products used by hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. I personally have served as CTO and CPO in the past, and there were times I had to lead a team of designers and engineers with no prior experience in NLU - and finding the right mentorship from people who've, in a technical sense, "been there, done that", was my job. And then there are other situations where startups loaded with money managed to hire some of the top talent in the industry to solve problems. I've been on a team like that as well. The examples I've mentioned have all delivered and successfully launched and grew products.

I do recognize that a lot of, if not most startups are managed rather poorly, and most of the time the co-founders have no idea what they're doing.

So yes, if I were to roll a die and observe, chances are the next startup one picks out of the bunch won't be managed well enough to offer decent mentorship.

However, I also wanted to share my thoughts on the matter because there are a lot of incredibly smart and talented people who have grown extremely fast in startup environments, with the mentorship from the community.

So I wouldn't discount working for a startup because good in-house mentorship is hard to come by.

The bits about "breadth > depth" and "working hard instead of smart" also seem to be common startup/co-founder problems.

I have to be completely honest - the only thing one can do is choose. Know what red flags to watch out for, look for that handful of good startups that actually value professional development and smart work culture.

They do exist. They're just hard to find - that's the name of the game, if building a good startup with a good work culture were so easy, every startup would be going public in five years.

The last two bits about hiring/firing and equity - unfortunately, yep, that's it.

Bottom line - if you're looking for a healthy financial return on your time, don't join a startup.

But if you're tired of mundane and predictable work trajectory and want to try out a high risk, high reward career track. Why not?