Depends on the employees and when they joined and if they exercised stock options or not. Big range from a few thousand to over $80,000.
Those employees are just as responsible for the company’s success as the founder is; it sucks to see them get shafted while the founder walks away with “fuck you” money.
To badly paraphrase someone: “The idea isn’t what’s valuable, the implementation is.” That implementation is probably >90% thanks to “the help”.
Did they take a full standard salary? (Doesn't have to be SV 100k+ salaries, but standard for whatever is paid in their area). Did they do more than just code? etc etc
By your logic, the butcher who worked for market wages in a meat processing company should get a big pay day because Nestle decided to buy them.
As for entitlement, what entitles a founder to get ~50x the payout of their employees? Especially when they're also taking a SV level salary (not living in SV) and spending VC money.
Add to it the last four years of "culture" growth leading all west coast tech workers to demand you add 10% overhead to your business to advance diversity, equity, and inclusivity, which in reality is just advocation for the right kind of politics to be brought into company culture, and you get a crazy stressful soup for any founder.
Moving on to your second point about entitlement. Of course the founder is entitled to 50x the payout. You seem to be severely discounting risk. Did you see this founder's list of other failures?[1] They can pay themselves whatever they feel is right. They took the risk, failed multiple times, and finally got lucky. Of course they can reward themselves how they see fit. There are so many founders who never see the reward and end up with worse careers because they only kept founding companies rather than choosing a "stable" career. To me it seems like, in your view, the guy who didn't take the risk founding companies and got to join a "sure" job by joining a rapidly growing startup gets to be rewarded comparably to the guy who started something, working, spending years not sure where it was going to go. Why would anyone take the risk of starting a company? I'd rather join a fast growing startup if my reward is quite comparable to the founder's. Low risk, high reward.
If you can, you should get a job at Google and get a great salary (which is still a tiny sliver of Google's monster profits).
If you can't then you have to settle for lower paying job at a company that doesn't have monster profits like Google and therefore cannot pay you outsized salary.
Employees don't "deserve" anything other than the market salary.
It goes both ways. Employers don't "deserve" Google-level programmers for half the salary that Google is willing to pay. And I'm sure they would love to get great talent at reduced prices just like you would love to get great salary regardless of your talent and contribution to the business.
The market salary happens when both parties work to advance their self interest. "deserving" has nothing to do with it.
If a founder is spending VC money and paying themselves a SV grade salary, I would have trouble calling that a significant amount of risk.
From the founder himself:
> We've had carryover losses for years, so from a tax perspective, there was no hit on either side.
I realize that tax losses can differ from cash losses, but are you so sure about that?
We’re also a company that has purposefully operated right around breakeven for years. So, unless you’re a “strategic acquistion” that throws acquistion multiples out the window, a slow-growth software company without lots of profits and a product that’s technically quite complex is ultimately just not going to get a huge multiple.
Most of my startup jobs have paid market rate. The shares and options have compensated for the risk, not a lower salary.
I'm sure some accept lower salaries, and certainly the salaries won't be comparable with the very top end of the market, but most people don't work in the top end of the market.
A startup that tried talking me into a massive cut without offering me basically founder-level share amounts would be an instant red flag.
And, as I've said elsewhere, startup salaries are rarely on par with the industry average. Working at a startup is typically sold as "you'll be paid less, but if we sell you'll get a payout to make up for it".
If you want "returns", you're better off getting a stable, higher paying job and investing the excess in public markets. You have diversification and liquidity.