> Founders don't work many more hours per day than early employees at x100 less than early employees. They work many more months/years before earning an income at all. > > By the time the employees start to get hired, a large part of the risk and work that a founder does to earn their hopeful future fat stacks has already been done.

What you describe isn't the case for most tech startups I know.

These startups need a lot of highly involved technical work done, and often need to hire a small team early on. They typically get seed money quickly. It's not unusual to see seed money right from the start.

> Now, are startup compensation packages a little low and relying on the money making reputation of past decades? Sure.

The point in this thread is not that it's "a little low".

The numbers quoted is that if you're a good engineer at a top tech company, you can almost guarantee about $2m over 4-5 years. In a startup, you'd make less than half of that in cash, with the only compensation being some stock options, that people are rapidly realizing are worth nothing in most cases.

That's a big difference, especially over many years. And we didn't even mention the large gaps in benefits, healthcare, work-life balance, job stability...

The bottom line is that the startups were so good at squeezing the real value out of their job offers, that now only irrational developers will choose them over bigger already successful companies.