This is a stupid view of motivation and competence.

First, it implies people are only motivated by money. At the first startup I worked at, one of the senior engineers had been through 4 successful exits and was in the business to build things.

Second, competence of the engineering org and individual engineers is orthogonal to successful exits. An engineer can successfully ship many iterations of a product that are just a bad market fit and the company will fail. I’d still take that engineer any day over the typical FAANG cog who’s big project was a 2 year tax billing database migration.