Neither, I really like Mailgun for their receiving email API. Their dev tools make everything really easy to set up and use. For outgoing email, Amazon SES works for me and is cheap.
This is great. I use a simple IFTTT recipe to blink my hue's at the start of the Yankees games but the ESPN api hook is always off by 10 minutes or more.
It really depends on the company and the terms of the investments they take on. This is a little case study of what you equity might look like if you joined Uber in 2012: https://equityzen.com/blog/uber-employee-shareholder-value-a... . It's a little outdated but it goes over some of the math you would need to figure out what your shares would be worth.
I don't know of anyone personally who got an exit like that but I do know companies are staying private longer nowadays. This can increase the risk for employees. EquityZen (where I work) is trying to make it easier for employees to exit before their company has an liquidity event. This blog post explores Fab and Aereo and how a big exit is not always guaranteed: https://equityzen.com/blog/learning-from-fab-and-aereo-liqui...