Just to bring some perspective...when I was starting out, I was a teacher. I put in 12-16 hour days, got paid the inflation adjusted equivalent of 23k/yr, and put school supplies on my CC while facing the significant opportunity cost of spending my most energetic years empowering others.

I finally burned out and “retired” to 10x the salary at half the time and energy cost.

My point is that people will do things that are not in their financial interests because they are believers. Early employees are believers. I think you are underestimating the amount that early employees are putting on the line, including things like out of pocket costs for services for those businesses. People ARE doing it wrong, if rationally self-interested is your metric.

I loved your response. Just to add to it: early startup employees aren't working hard just because they selflessly want to contribute. They often hold the belief (typically mistaken nowadays) that their equity will be worth tens of millions of dollars, because that's what the founders told them. So they pour their heart and soul into this venture that will surely make them rich.

> Hours and days don’t capture the value. I have risked my house, every minute of spare time, I have put Heroku bills on my personal credit card, paid contractors out of my pocket and had to create something out of nothing within a difficult market vertical. Comparing that to a “long day at the office” doesn’t even compute.

First of all, kudos to you for being so dedicated and courageous.

Most startup founders that I know aren't like you at all.

Often they have seed funding very early. Not only do they pay nothing out of pocket, but typically they can draw a modest salary pretty early on.

The other thing is that nobody is claiming you shouldn't get more equity, that is fair. My argument is against ridiculous assessments that "founders always work x100 harder than any employee".

Most founders I've seen weren't like you, and I've seen early employees working harder than founders in some cases.

Fair point. I haven’t been lucky enough to raise a $750k seed round because I went to Stanford and play tennis with a Sequoia partner. So my perspective is based on my experience of actually suffering to build something while, you are correct, many decently funded startups could do a better job of sharing the reward with early employees — especially when founders are essentially spending other people’s money.