My First Million · Episode Brief
10 Startups w/ Stock Grants That’ll Make You A Millionaire | Sara’s List 2024
Sara's List 2024: Ten Pre-IPO Companies Where an Employee Might Get Rich
This is the third iteration of Sara's List—a framework developed by Sam's research collaborator for identifying private companies that offer equity compensation significant enough to create life-changing wealth for employees who join at the right stage. The 2024 list covers OpenAI, Retool, Mercury, Cursor, Epirus, Wiz, Neuralink, Perplexity AI, Traba, and Replit.
The exercise is not 'which companies will be biggest.' It is 'which companies will generate meaningful equity outcomes for non-founding employees who join now.' That distinction matters because a company can be worth $100 billion and still give employees options that expire worthless if the valuation was too high when they joined, or if the preferred stock structure heavily dilutes common. Sara's methodology looks at valuation trajectory, dilution history, and how each company treats employee equity relative to investor equity.
The Cohort 1 audit is the episode's most honest segment: they go back to the first Sara's List and score how each pick aged. Some were right for the wrong reasons; some were wrong despite solid logic. The point is not to celebrate wins—it's to build a better model by examining where the framework broke down.
Cursor gets significant airtime because it is the freshest addition—a coding tool that had grown from near-zero to substantial ARR in a compressed timeframe, with a team small enough that early employees would hold meaningful equity stakes. The hosts use it to illustrate what 'right stage' actually means: enough traction to know it works, early enough that the equity math still favors an employee.
Key Ideas
- →Sara's List evaluates pre-IPO equity potential for employees, not just company size—a $100B company can still give employees bad outcomes
- →The audit of Cohort 1 reveals where the methodology overfitted to hype vs. durable fundamentals
- →Cursor's inclusion reflects the 'right stage' thesis: traction confirmed, team still small enough for equity to matter
- →Wiz and Perplexity represent different risk profiles—Wiz is late-stage and safer, Perplexity is earlier and more volatile
- →Preferred vs. common stock dynamics mean that employee equity can be near-worthless even in a successful exit if the cap table is structured badly
Worth Remembering
The Cohort 1 audit: grading their own previous picks with visible honesty about which calls aged poorly
Sam's framing of Neuralink's inclusion: 'the lottery ticket on the list—not a prediction, just an asymmetric bet'
The Cursor deep-dive where the hosts calculate what a senior engineer's equity stake might be worth at various exit valuations