Good founders live and breathe their business every minute of their life. They're up most of the night and back at it the next day at 6am. They're constantly worried about increasing revenue, the threat of competition, and making sure there's enough cash in the bank to keep payroll afloat. They're the ones who go without a paycheck when things get tight and sacrifice time among family and friends due to the never-ending deadlines.

Employees get to bounce around from company to company, commanding an ever-increasing salary due to the bubble we're in, and usually get a solid chunk of equity to boot. They work their hours, they take their vacation time, they come on HN and wax about the insensitivity of the open-office floorplan, or that lunch is only catered 3 days a week. They have a never-ending flow of job offers in their inbox and when things aren't going their way, they can simply pack up, walk away (with equity in hand), and move onto the next cushy job. They aren't up late at night worried about how they're going to make ends meet the next day, their biggest concern tends to be whether they embrace the latest JS framework or wait the three months til it's supplanted.

I'm sorry if you've encountered founders that treat their employees like shit, but dammit, most of us do our best effort to take care of our employees with competitive salaries, excellent benefits, fair equity amounts, and frequent profit-sharing bonuses. We don't take lofty profits, we invest it right back into the company so we can hire more people and provide better accommodations. But if we come across as thinking we should eventually reap the benefits of a successful company: you're goddamn right we do, we earned it.

The opposing argument is that if you spread that potential rewards around a bit more, you'll get more people working long hours for the good of he company, and not 1-2 doing it alone.