> I know lots of smart people who worked for at least 10 years in very intense startup environments and got essentially nothing out of it. Often, they have to fallback on a life of contract work for huge boring corporations.

Yes, it's not guaranteed by anything.

I also know of cases where founder alone ended up with billions and early employees got nothing.

I just see those startups as poorly executed who decided to kill their army after victory way home.

We should strive for execution where at least your comrades also win.

"We should strive for execution where at least your comrades also win." --> this won my heart!

It is not a zero-sum game. You win when your comrades win. The glory is not in taking it all but taking pride in what you have created and can potentially create and expand on over and over again. :)

From the perspective of all VC's and some founders, this is in fact the very definition of a zero sum game.

Every dollar of an exit given to an employee is a dollar that the VC or founder can't have.

It's the ideal the whole industry segment is founded on. Just like every other ideal, it's attainable only by the extremely lucky. Everybody else has to deal with the externalities.

Strip the ideal away and people will leave in droves. Without a differentiator, startups are just like everything else.

One thing that I've learned though is that you should try to work for rich people who believe that we're in a meritocracy. When these people see talent, they tend to think that it's much more valuable than it actually is.

If those people are rich enough, they can surround themselves with talent, and notice that while talented people are a small fraction of population, in absolute numbers it is still a large number of people who need to somehow pay their bills.

Then it's time to play the game of "compete against each other, and the worst 10% gets fired". Suddenly the talent becomes cheaper, and stops talking about work-life balance.

Joining an early startup is high risk high reward. 90%+ of the time nothing comes of it. But when it does it pays out big.