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Hey, it's Jessie. We are on hiatus this week, so I dug into the archives to bring you one of my very favorite episodes.

And lately, I have been going way back. I've been listening to the very first season of Hello Monday when we had different music and even some different voices and a different producer before Sarah.

And those early episodes, there's a certain magic to them. Some of them are so fun.

Today's conversation is with a guy who was an exceptional chef who was in the right place at the right time.

This man named Charlie Ayers, I remember going to the Bay Area to do this episode with him in person.

We recorded together in a studio out there and it was so magical, so lovely.

So I invite you to sit back and listen to the story of what happens when you are an incredible chef who just happens to join a multi-billion-dollar tech company right before the IPO.

Have a good week. See you next week.

From the editorial team at LinkedIn, I'm Jessie Hempel, and this is Hello Monday, a show where I investigate how we're changing the nature of work and how that work is changing us.

The myth of Silicon Valley is that you might just land early at a start-up and strike it rich when that company goes public.

Shares of Google, the company that makes the world's most popular internet search engine, went on sale to Great Fanfare today.

The offering was the biggest for an internet technology company in four years and made its founders billionaires.

But let's face it, this almost never happens. Instead, people work their tails off for tiny salaries, hoping their stock options turn into the kind of money that helps with the down payment on a house.

And most startups fail.

Even when they succeed, most people don't arrive early enough to see a huge payout. But that myth I was talking about, it exists because for a tiny group of people, luck wins.

This spring, as many of tech's most promising startups like Uber and Lyft and Pinterest and Slack are finally going public, people will start to get payouts.

But very few people will end up as lucky as Charlie Ayers.

Charlie was Google's first chef and employee number 53 at the company. Shortly after he left in 2006, his stock options were worth $40 million.

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