You should work for us because, it's, like, really great! You should want to work 55 hours a week because you really want to! The fact that you're creating stockholder wealth is merely incidental.
Every company in the valley seems to pay "market wages" and then complain that there's simply not enough talent out there. It shouldn't be about the money for them. They should want to work here, because it's so great!
People should be paid what's "fair" and should want to work as much as is practical. Some kid out of college should be paid what's fair for them as a person - it's like a moral issue - not according to the value they create for the company, which can be enormous even if it's just a kid of school. And we need rock stars, not warm bodies, even if the gain to the company from hiring each non-rock star is still enormous.
I am familiar with several SV firms that would make like $400,000 per year per new hire, but insist on paying "market wages" based on experience, and then complain it's impossible to find enough people to hire. You think if we were on wall street a firm would hesitate to double someone's salary if the firm thought they could make double that by hiring them? No one in SV wants to compete on pay. Everyone wants to convince themselves that they've created the greatest place on earth to work, and that everyone should work there because it's so great. The fact that they create wealth for the stockholders is a benign coincidence.
If SV ran the retail industry, everyone with the same job titles would make pretty much the same amount of money working at either Saks Fifth Avenue or Old Navy. What if Saks wanted to hire someone away from Old Navy? They would try to convince them that Saks is really great!! Not because Saks could see that it could gain more from the person working for them than at Old Navy than Old Navy would and can therefore pay them more. That's economic efficiency. But it seems kind of crass, doesn't it? You should want to work for us! Because it's so great, and we'll give you a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of the equity.
What if I went around telling employers I wanted a strict 40 hour work week? How suddenly would they forget about that hiring shortage? Wanting to work less shows you don't care. You should want to work here. Not because by you working here it creates more wealth for us than we're going to pay you. You think that multiple still doesn't apply if someone is working 13% less hours!? But someone who wants to work less doesn't care, and you should want to work and want to work here as much as possible.
I get six dozen recruiter emails a week. All of them sound exactly the same - you should work here because it's so great! None of them want to compete on fundamentals - pay me more and give me more vacation time. How distasteful! As a result I am completely indifferent between all of them. Everyone likes to pretend it's not about money and there is no price curve for labor. It's weird.