I can go on and on.
I think getting into debt is dumb, but statistics show that founders risk a lot more than employees. And many people do not want to be founders. Please don't call them slaves.
Additionally, early engineers and biz folks are usually brought on specifically because the founders don't know what the fuck they're doing in either technology or business.
There's this big myth that being a founder is some magical hardship and a massive fucking gamble, but the realities don't make that so--instead, it's used to justify fleecing employees out of market rates.
https://qz.com/455109/entrepreneurs-dont-have-a-special-gene...
CB Insights also concurred with the principle in their May 8th email.
In regards to the Startup School lecture, one of the points Dustin Moskovitz makes in his talk is that you have a better shot at doing well financially if you join a startup at Series B+ than you do trying to start your own startup. You'll have less stress and if you join the next mega-successful company, you'll most likely make more money. There's also a huge amount of learning that takes place working at a rocket ship for a few years and the brand creditability is worth something too. The hard part is picking a startup that is actually the next Google, Facebook, Uber, etc and sticking around until it goes public to exercise your options (especially since companies are taking longer to go public and lock up early employees with golden handcuffs - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_handcuffs).
That being said, if your goal is to get rich, your best bet is probably to start an actual business, raise as little money as possible, and "sell early" - e.g. acquired for < $30M. If you look at most acquisitions, most of them are under the $30M mark (https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/tech-companies-exit-early-st...).
The reality with taking venture capital is even if you take a "small" amount of from seed investors of lets say $2M in exchange for a 20% stake, you're looking at a $50M exit to make back 5x the VC's money (simplifying the math and not accounting for additional liquidation preferences), which in a VCs perspective isn't that great. They're more so looking for a 10x return, so $100M is the minimum for a seed investment.
Probably the ideal scenario for the founder trying to become wealthy is to just be as lean a possible, keep as much equity as possible and ultimately sell to become financially secure. Once you have enough money to keep you set for your life, then maybe it makes more sense to swing for the fences.
In a statistics sense I'd be curious what the expected (average) return on being a founder is