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.