Your Equity Isn’t a Payment, it’s an IOU

What you buy when you invest in a startup is the opportunity to make your investment back tenfold or more within a relatively short timeframe. With that kind of potential payoff there is obviously a huge risk. So if the founders have done whatever they could to make it work and it still tanks, well bad luck to everybody. But it's part of the deal.

If you want a safe investment buy government bonds.