> the reason they don't start companies is they don't have the savings to work on it for 6-12 months, and gamble on getting accepted into YC or another angel/accelerator. They don't have a safety net to fall back on if that fails.
Which is part of the reason for their compensation.
Did the first few factory workers and car design people at Ford become millionaires (in their equivalent dollars)? Probably not, but if you're the first engineer of a Twitter, Google, etc. it's not unreasonable to see your net worth to reach 7 figures, if not 8 figures. Early engineers are compensated just fine IMO, they are just taking a big gamble relative to the market (i.e. $500k annual salary at Google).