(Bloomberg) -- For employees, joining a startup can be like making a bet: That getting shares in the business will one day provide a lucrative payout, despite the long hours and instability. Rank-and-file staff who are in the right place at the right time – a hot company in a soaring market – can score millions. But even in the good times, many workers walk away without much to show for their stock options.

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And this year is not poised to be a good time. Late-stage companies that were expected to enter the public markets this year are facing uncertainty, and big-ticket company sales have become increasingly rare. The result is less liquidity for startup workers, more interest in creative ways to cash out and, for many, at least a short-term hit to compensation.

Startup equity “is such a black box for people. You join a company and you sign this equity package, and the reality is you don't know how it’ll work,” said Jaime Moreno de los Rios, chief operating officer at Secfi, which helps startup employees manage their shares. “People thought 2022 was going to be their year. All of a sudden things froze.”

On average, stock options make up about 86% of a Silicon Valley startup staffer’s net worth, according to a recent report by Secfi, which analyzed more than 4,300 stock option grants uploaded to its platform by employees last year. That means that many workers are badly exposed to declines in tech market valuations, which have hit both the public and private sectors. Meanwhile, about a quarter of companies on the Secfi platform reduced their internal valuations in 2022.

At the same time, a recent report from salary tracker Levels.fyi found that total compensation had fallen across a wide swathe of tech industry jobs in 2022.