alt Hacker NewsI've done a few types of jobs myself and unfortunately not really found offer frameworks that look like "capped downside and uncapped(ish) upside" based on performance.
Ideally what many senior engineers are probably looking for is - I can live on 50-75% of my TC a few years without setting myself too far back, and I'd work really hard on an interesting project that has a >25% chance of rewarding me 2-4xTC. It is not too expensive to roll that dice, and I have a reasonable chance of hitting in one career.
Instead we get a lot of lottery ticket profile things that are like "1% chance of 1000xTC". The EV looks good, but you don't get enough rolls of the dice for that 1% to pay off in a single lifetime let along career.
a unicorn like you're mentioning isn't linear. a 1% 1000x business probably can stop along the way when you reach a TC you're comfortable with, that you have a 1% of hitting that 1000x doesn't mean you don't have a 25% of hitting 2-4x with the same idea before. There's a lot of people who made their money by bootstraping business 0 to 100k, etc, and selling. (There's also people who center on buying 100k business and growing it to the million stage... and so on)