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Silicon Valley's best kept secret: Founder liquidity

Ask most venture-backed founders why they get 10x more equity than employee #1, 100x more equity than employee #5, and 1000x more equity than employee #15, and you'll get the same answer: "I'M TAKING SO MUCH RISK, IT'S SO HARD TO START A COMPANY, I MADE A BIG MOVE!!!" And

This mythos justifies the enormous equity stakes founders hold compared to early employees who take very similar risks by joining an unproven startup. There are other stories like Hopin where the founder takes tens or hundreds of millions in secondary just to later sell the company for less than the liquidation preference stack and leave the employees with a grand total of zero dollars for their equity. As of 4 months ago I left a very successful stealth startup (which grew to 40M in ARR in two years) to become a founder and that is when it clicked - I expected to feel stressed, pressured, and the weight of all of the risk I was taking.

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