Being a founder in a SV-funded startup is not a hardship. You spend some number of weeks taking coffees with investors. You get funding and start recruiting friends and posting job openings. You go to SV conferences and meetups where, as Founder, you're one of the elite. You're invited to the summer party at August Capital, and year-round founder events by your investors. And yes, you work hard.

And the employees also work hard, and are working on reduced pay, and are doing it because it's fun and they believe in the mission. And they believe they're all "in this together," but learn otherwise only when the big day arrives.

The GitHub founders spent 5 years entirely bootstrapped before taking any outside investment. IIRC, they spent the first 2 without any employees, doing all coding, sales, and evangelism themselves and making barely-pay-the-rent revenue. Their salary had they not started GitHub would've been roughly $300K/year. That's close to a million each in opportunity cost, with no obvious indication they'd be successful at the end. (They were themselves early employees of PowerShell, working for startup salaries until it was acquired by Microsoft. They chose not to continue working at Microsoft after the acquisition.)

Methinks you need to distinguish between startups like Theranos, Clinkle, or Juicero, where a well-connected and charismatic founder meets an investor who takes on all the risk and then they crash and burn spectacularly and nobody gets their money back, and a bootstrapped team of engineers that build a product millions of people want and then get handsomely rewarded 11 years later.

Your story doesn’t speak well of SV. If employees are led to believe — or even let to believe — they are in this with the founders and will share in the rewards but it’s not in their contracts... I’m not sure if it’s on the Founders or the people who believe beyond what their contracts oblige their founders and investors to perform. Which case are you making here? Personally, I assume I don’t get anything not stipulated in the employment contract regardless of enthusiastic assurances to the contrary.

let’s not sit here and pretend it’s that simple.

there is certainly a gulf in the present day equity split between even the least helpful founder and the most instrumental employee.

It certainly is that simple. I know a lot of serial contractors who would rather take the guaranteed $150/hour instead of $95/hour+equity because the latter is a crap shoot. Sure, there will be cases where they could say "If I had taken the equity deal on GitHub/Instagram/Fabulous Startup I could retire now".... they can dry their tears with the realization they are still in the top 2% of all income earners even without the equity millions.

let’s face it: the distribution of equity is about leverage and convention.

as a community, we anchor each other by saying things like what you’re saying. if more people felt the way i do, as a community, we would not accept the status quo.

it sounds as though your stance is founded upon a just-world hypothesis.

Many employees do much more than what they're asked to do. Stay longer hours, postpone their families and many times take salary hits, refuse job offers, give away intellectual property... many even put their health and marriage on the line.

And without that sacrifice on the part of employees, many companies would never have made it out of a vast pool of mediocre nondescript companies.

This is not the case for every employee or every company, but I think you need to balance your world view a little bit.

While that’s true that’s also their problem.

Unless they are being forced to do that without proper compensation in which case they should leave they aren’t and shouldn’t be awarded with extra just because they are workaholics if nothing else is that because it forces other people to invest more than they want or can.

For quite some time in the start of my working career I was staying till 9-10pm at work working on extra projects, perfecting something having fun etc. until at some point my then manager took me a side and told me to stop it not because of what it did to my life and not even because of the potential liability the company had but because of my other team members.

He basically said look you are 25 you can do what ever the hell you want but “Joe” is 42 and “Mark” is 45 don’t put them in a position to have to compete with you when there is nothing on the line.

Since then and since getting much more experience I’ve really taken that to heart and I actually detest people who spend considerable amount of time on top what is expected and appropriate at work and I work actively to prevent anyone on my team or who I engage with doing so.

If you like to code 24/7 do your 9/5 job and then work on some FOSS project on the side, take a 2nd job or volunteer at some charity and build them a new donor engagement platform. Don’t force me to feel bad or uncomfortable for leaving at 5.

I understand. I am just challenging that "employees take no risks" view.

"Employees knowing the risks" makes me think of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQdDRrcAOjA