I regularly have to interact with large companies I have no "direct" equity in, and I think it's fairly standard.

Some are my clients, who may need my help BECAUSE their internal bureaucracy is causing them problems. One recent personal example: a company has a hiring freeze or other policy preventing them from hiring a new full time member, but they still require technical support, and have some budget for an "outside consultant" to get them through this period. I have no equity in this company, but I am still being paid by them and incentivized to work through their problem even when another internal department of theirs is blocking or otherwise complicating the process with bureaucracy.

There have been times where I need to provision something for less than $20 dollars on a company card... and to justify that cost, I have to hold multiple hour long meetings with multiple higher level employees attending and discussing. My agency is billing them at least $100 for my hour alone, meaning that holding the meeting and deciding not to spend said money has already cost them more than just spending the $20 even if that was a complete waste of $20 on an unnecessary service.

Another common example is working with my client's clients, usually large platform or service vendors. While I might not have direct equity in a provider, there is usually a high cost to re-platform or replace a key service, even with a near-equivalent provider, and so it makes sense for me to spend time trying to work with the original service provider even if they are difficult to work with.

In my previous career as a teacher I had to deal with a metric fuckton of school bureaucracy and administrators. Not sure why the education system around my area is so bloated with non-teaching administrative staff members; not sure how you can justify paying more people as "administrators" than ground level workers like teachers and custodians, but some places seem to have the opposite allocation of staff resources.

In the past this is why things like per diems came into being - the paperwork tracking it was more expensive than just letting everyone have their $50 and who cares if some brought a sandwich from home and pocketed it.

A wise company would make sure any consulting contract had a fixed $500 or whatever for "incidentals" - and if they weren't needed and the consultant pocked it, who cares?

It's also why postage for letters was a fixed rate, it was cheaper than charging differently for every location.

A paycheck, meaningful work that aligns with your values or goals in life, getting experience in a more mature org before jumping to a startup, job stability of a large company, interesting work, off the top of my head.

Sometimes you need to deal with a glitch on their end and end up stonewalled because nobody who you're allowed to talk to has the authority to fix your problem