Work at a startup in a field you love with coworkers who also pour their blood sweat and tears into the company, only to have the founders fail upwards and employees left with nothing. Then you might feel differently.

Founders shouldn't be exiting with massive rewards when the risk they took was only marginally higher than early employees.

Yeah, I enjoyed my time there and I learned a lot. But a mismanaged company shouldn't reward the management and leave employees with nothing after all is said and done.

Been there, done that several times. Everything has risks, I've optimized for the ones I'm comfortable with.

To many people who value $$$ to get other important things in their life, shares are a meaningful factor in their expected value from devoting their life to a job.

So when you say you don't work at a startup for monetary reasons, and that you don't care about shares, which has an expected value of real money despite the uncertain outcome, it's natural to wonder if you don't care about compensation aka money.