[horsawlarway]

The best way to motivate any employee is to give them a vested interest in the company (ownership, equity, profit share, etc).

Prod can be running as smoothly as you like - it doesn't matter if your company is having its lunch eaten by competitors adding or improving features faster than you.

You should be incentivizing employees to step back and look at the big picture every now and then. If customers are happy, the company is profitable, and prod is running smoothly? Go take some time off, head out early, etc.

Is revenue down? Company growth slowing, or worse, is the company shrinking? Time to work. Prod being red or green has little to do with it.

[snidane]

That kind of works in theory or for people up there in decision making ranks. For engineers down in the trenches it might not be such a motivating factor because they don't feel their individual contributions matter as much. It might motivate them to stay and slack off without getting fired until the company does an exit. So one might suggest giving devs equity would motivate them not to their maximum potential, but rather to the very minimum which will not get them fired before the cash day.

Also I'm sure we could come up with examples of people who got a good amount of equity just because they were there among the first employees and then not working at all because, well, their profit was already locked in by just waiting for others to do the hard work.