[ryandrake]

Companies want to have the scrappiness, grit, late hours, and employee devotion of a startup but without having to pay that pesky "outsized upside" when things go well.

I once worked for a small closely held company (CEO and family were the sole, bootstrapped shareholders, no institutional funding), where the CEO would regularly moan and complain that his employees were so lazy and not dedicated enough and that they should "treat it as if it were their own business." It never really dawned on him that they might do that if it actually were partially their own business, with an equity stake (or even a bonus structure that rewarded effort).