[awinder]

Have you considered going in the other direction and working for a public company? I had similar feelings to components of this, and you might find it interesting / refreshing to see how companies work when leadership is primarily geared around returning for-real, actually-generated cash to investors. If you end up at companies that are in the middle and have been around for a while, the CEO's job is absolutely to get to a liquidity event. And you'd be right to realize that impacts the total environment of what is being built & how it's being built, it's not a con IMO though, it's a bad situation.

Getting a bootstrapped company into something that yields enough cash for a salary isn't something that happens all the time, and it's going to require you to have some significant cash reserves. So if you can't do that right now, think about maybe making changes that build towards that future and focus on that, rather than the vagaries of what executives are doing & why they're doing it ;-).