Founders with breakout successes get the best terms ever now; that is true. On the other hand, investors have more power to fuck with founders' careers (even years after the venture dissolves), and founders who fail are more desperate to get back into conventional careers due to the disgustingly high housing prices that exist now. Venkat talks about the old-school serial entrepreneur: the 10x hustler who learned a little bit from each failure and finally had a huge hit on his 5th attempt (usually around age 40, at which point he'd be unfundable by contemporary VC-istan standards).

That person is gone now. In contemporary VC-istan, no one gets a 3rd startup, thanks to the collusive and almost certainly illegal reputation economy that exists there. You might get a second shot if you come back to your VC bosses with your tail between your legs.

That's because VCs have set themselves up as the executives of the first post-modern company: VC-istan. "Entrepreneurs" are hustling project managers. The investor/founder separation exists to hide the Effort Thermocline (the level at which jobs become easier with increasing rank, not harder) because it exists between two companies, with a distinct power relationship of one over the other.

Hell, most VCs won't even talk to you if you were lack-of-fit for a regular corporate job. They want to fund banker kids who did Analyst -> Private Equity. (This is the MBA stereotype, but it's the 2nd tier of those who do MBAs. The top tier skip MBA school and become parasitic PEtards two years early.) True hustlers and technologists are second-class citizens; they work too hard and don't have the social polish to exploit "just like me" chickenhawking of their backers.