"Pay off the mortgage" equity, however, continues long after that. Yelp started in 2004, I really doubt that Eevee was a single-digit employee there. I know folks who started at Google as employee ~20,000 in 2008-2009 and ended up with "pay off the mortgage" equity, particularly if you're living in Las Vegas instead of Silicon Valley.
Agreed there's a big difference between "Pay off the $100K Las Vegas McMansion" equity and "Pay off the $1M Palo Alto starter home" equity. My guess is that the former is do-able if you find the right company (who will also let you work from your cheaper remote location). For the latter, I still don't believe you're going to see that without a gamble on a very early stage company.
And, since this is HN, of course I always need to preface with "Yes, I know you can point to a handful of outlier counter-examples, but they don't disprove the general case".
