[wpietri]

I guess you've worked your way up from incoherence to confused but apparently baseless allegations.

You appear to suggest that Zynga is typical. It isn't. Indeed, it's gotten so much press because it is very different than the Silicon Valley norms.

From the exits I've seen, early employees generally do well when founders do well. The only financial games I've heard of are ones that VC investors play with founders. E.g., the joy of "participating preferred". But even those aren't games like Hollywood plays: nobody bends the rules or hides profits.

As a counterexample to Zynga, consider Google. The NY Times estimated in 2007 that there were more than 1,000 employees worth $5m or more thanks to stock and options: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/technology/12google.html

[its_so_on]

I have to say that 90% of what I said applies to the vast majority of startups today, rather than the occassional one that succeeds big. Google is characteristic of a different era and philosophy; I doubt very much that it would be possible for Google to have become Google in today's ethos, and if it did, it would not have created more than a handful of truly rich people.

[wpietri]

And what's your basis for saying you have insight into the vast majority of startups today? Because an assertion from an anonymous, semi-coherent commenter isn't doing it for me.

As another counterexample, I just checked the YouTube purchase. They started much later than Google. When they sold for $1.6 billion, about 140 million ended up in the hands of the 20 non-founder employees with enough equity to list in the SEC filing:

http://www.secinfo.com/d14D5a.uM1t.htm#10gr

That includes these titles: Senior User Interface Designer, Director for Networking at YouTube, Senior Engineer, Engineering Manager; Vice President of Content at YouTube, Director of Product Development, Director of Customer Support, Systems Architect and Office Manager.

[its_so_on]

hi, youtube is the same era and was heavily influenced in gearing up, by input from google management. I'm talking about now.

[wpietri]

YouTube is definitely not the same era. Google was started in 1998, and was firmly part of Bubble 1.0. YouTube was started in 2005 by former PayPal people. I see no evidence that their early employee equity deals were influenced by Google management; if you have some, please provide it.

I can't, of course, prove anything about this week's equity deals by looking at IPO numbers because median time-to-exit is circa 7 years and we had a long period with few IPOs. But I don't have any reason to think that people today are doing something much different. But these historical numbers seem in line with current advice. E.g.: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/11/employee-equity-how-much.htm...

You also ignore my request for evidence about your sweeping statements about the current state of things. Unless you have some, I'm going to presume that you're one of the many anonymous disgruntled people on the Internet. If you did get screwed, I'm sorry about that, but I don't think that's reason to go around tarring a whole industry.