I worked for a "startup" that was going on 10 years old, $190 million in funding and was still not profitable.

I was stunned by just how many of the long-time employees had no understanding of stock options. One was actually flabbergasted to learn that each funding round was creating new shares and diluting the value of existing ones; he thought the founders were selling their own shares to raise the money!

The ignorance was due in part to the company being in a region where startups and stock options are not common. Another big factor was willful deception by the founders, who had been promising to start the IPO process for three years, and frequently estimated that their IPO valuation would be equivalent to Facebook's.