Right but Shazam was founded in 1999 and took almost 20 years to exit.

You can't look at these numbers in a vacuum.

But also Shazam took about $100m in funding with no down rounds.

It wouldn't have been life-changing money for you, it would have been a minor bonus. Usually, only the founders make life-changing money from big deals except in very rare instances, like Microsoft and Google. I doubt any but a few very early employees did well at Shazam. Meanwhile, I'm sure what you learned at the startup you joined was far more valuable than whatever the bonus was. You made the choice with the information at hand.

Equity for employees is trash value. You would do well to just pretend it doesn't even exist when factoring decisions about where to work or if to change jobs. I never ask for equity, I never care about equity. I care about the salary.

Those were innocent times. When it founded it seemed like a stupid toy, and no one on the general public was talking about it's now obvious eventual use case as a surveillance tool.

Well to be fair, no one still talks about that publicly as a selling point, they use other words instead like "collecting aggregate data on user purchasing trends"