That wasn't how things were 10-15 years ago. What changed over the last decade was the pumping up of private valuations such that by the time the startups finally hit a liquidity event, they were overvalued.
There's definitely a misalignment between who founders think should be on the cap table vs those further up the food chain, and these long-running deals are I think partially done to cull the herd so to speak.
We tell a story about risk and innovation that justifies founders and early employees getting massively more value (equity) than later employees.
And the amount of equity given out falls off a cliff as the company grows. So you have some people with ownership that is 10x, 100x or even 1000x larger than others. That leads to radically different outcomes.
What if we rethought equity rewards to substantially flatten those ratios? And maybe 20:1 or something was the max ratio.
Then employees truly are owners.
Certainly lots of issues with this half baked idea. But my overall point is that I think the typical equity pyramid is deeply unfair. It could be more equitable.
> I think it was my old friend from Walla Walla, Franc Sawatzki, who donated a drafting table that we valued at something like $100. Given that the sale to Hasbro yielded over $1,400 per share, that $100 “investment” yielded something like $280,000 a decade later. Not bad!
https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/2013-adkison-wizardsoft...
I don't see any new company printing money like Facebook or Google.