Specially the part of “most of our employees are below 30”, sounds like that sound bite is still fresh on the mind from that conversation with investors.
Most big tech engineers who went to SV in 2010's have experienced unprecedented appreciation to their equity and that forms their baseline of expectations. For a lot of people, it is not "oh my 100k a year equity grew to 300k a year", its my income per year grew 300k a year and my expectations are for 500k a year from now on. This is especially bizarre at companies which fail to make money because their business model is flawed, no amount of engineering talent can make a shitty business model functional. What this all means is that we are in for a slow down in the next ten years.