HP

You'll never get paid the value you create at a big company

James Hong built a website at HP that eliminated three jobs but only got a $5,000 raise. He realized big companies pay people near the median value any employee provides, not the value an individual actually creates, so the way to capture your own value is to work for yourself.

“And I just remember thinking, like, I'll never make as much money as the value I deliver in a company, because a company, a big company at least, has to kind of pay people based on kind of like the median value that any given person at the company will provide.”

Steal thisIf you consistently create far more value than your salary, stop waiting for a raise and go capture that value working for yourself.

The smart Berkeley kids went to HP; the weak students went to eBay and Yahoo

Out of Berkeley in '95, the top students took 'safe' jobs at Intel and HP while weaker classmates took jobs at unheard-of startups like eBay and Yahoo. When Yahoo IPO'd around '96, those friends got rich, and Hong realized he had been playing the wrong game.

“And meanwhile, our friends who were not as strong students who couldn't get into a good grad school, who couldn't get a job at HP, they ended up taking jobs at other places that we'd never heard of, like eBay and Yahoo or whatever. So like around '96 or '97, maybe '96, whenever Yahoo went public, all these friends got rich, and that's kind of like when you realized that like, oh, like— What game should I be playing?”