At larger companies I can sell my stock immediately, and the salary and benefits are better.

My health insurance from AWS was about the same coverage/cost that I got from a startup I worked at that had 10 employees for a year or so afterwards, but the insurance from the startup had much better humans for me to talk to when there were issues. As for the extra money, my point was that I've found my quality of life is higher working for companies where I know where I stand in the medium-to-long term.

I definitely don't have any illusions that this is based on a number of personal factors (e.g. my overall financial situation making any additional income not likely to drastically change my quality of life and the somewhat unorthodox medical needs of someone in my family causing me to need to talk to the insurance company a few times a year to sort things out). The comment at the beginning of this thread was asking " Who would join a startup these days?" though, so my answer is basically "someone like me". I don't pretend to have any idea how many others like me there are, only that the tradeoffs for larger companies don't really make much sense for me.