Talent going to rest and vest at lucrative cushy megacorp jobs or else toiling away on projects that would never see the light of day due to bureaucracy at the same megacorps, rather than working at riskier, more imaginative, companies?

Though you can't blame it exclusively on FAANG when rapidly rising living costs since 2008 and the housing crisis in tech hubs tend to force workers to seek the safest, most stable career paths.

FAANG RSUs relate to venture, and by extension startups, for two reasons:

(A) - They make it harder for startups to hire the "best" talent because it is locked up behind a vesting schedule at a FAANG.

(B) - It makes it harder to hire other non-FAANG folks because the comp baseline is so high. Why work at a startup for X w/illiquid options when I could work at FAANG and make X*2 + RSUS that are fairly liquid. Even if those compensation expectations are unrealistic outside of FAANG, they are still there.

This also increases the amount of money startups need to raise by default just to get baseline talent -> leading to over-raising and overvaluation -> leading to benchmarks that are unrealistic -> leading to unnecessary flameouts -> leading to aqui-hires by FAANG.