[nostrademons]

I think the key difference between founders vs. early employees is in risk tolerance. An early employee should be able to go to work reasonably confident that he will get paid for his time and his efforts will not be completely futile. The job description for "founder", however, involves finding a reason for the company to exist, and that inherently involves the risk that you could put in a lot of work and it'll still count for nothing.

Aston (presumably) made out with a lot more than the $300/400K a year that a Google/Facebook engineer tops out at. He also took on more risk, but the risk was largely technical risk: the possibility that him and his teammates couldn't deliver what 65,000 people said they wanted. That risk is largely under their control, while as a founder, the primary risk is that nobody wants your product or it can't be built economically.

I do think that the large amount of money in the funding ecosystem lately has distorted this bargain somewhat. In boom times, you get cases where the founders get funded on hope & pedigree and draw a salary immediately (meaning that their financial risk is more akin to an early employee's), and then they go and hire a bunch of naive employees at below-market rates before getting any validation that people want their product (meaning that the employee now takes on market risk that was previously reserved for the founder). This doesn't do either the company or the employee any good; these companies are significantly more likely to fail than ones who stay founder-only while they prove out the market, and they ruin more peoples' lives when they do. If you look at employee #1's who have actually made out well - eg. those at Google, DropBox, Thumbtack, AirBnB, SnapChat, etc. - all of those companies had validated demand, had raised funding, and in many cases were already in use by thousands of people when they hired their first employee.