[ryandrake]

I'm going to part with the accepted dogma to say that I don't think that equity ownership motivates workers towards doing a good job, at least at large companies. If you are engineer number 54,291 moving a protobuf from one layer in the stack to another, nothing you do is going to move the needle on the stock price, either positive or negative. You could write the best, most efficient code, fully unit tested and crash-free, but if Morgan Stanley downgrades the company's stock because of some bad earnings call, it's going to go down.

I have equity as part of my comp package, and I know there is zero link between how good a job I do and which way the Wall Street Wind blows today. So to me it's just like cash but with extra steps.

Maybe it's different in the startup world, I don't know. The only startup I was part of, everyone's equity went to zero when the business failed, regardless of how well anyone did their job, so I'm not much of a believer.