[tptacek]

This appears to be a story about someone who created no actual value walking away with 2MM.

That's fine; it's not per se unjust. It's just not, like, a moral imperative that it happen that way.

Also: speaking as someone who has been doing startups since 1995 and only recently had a significant success: I call total bullshit on the idea that founders "bet their lives". We're some of the most employable people in the world.

[kasey_junk]

>I call total bullshit on the idea that founders "bet their lives".

So much this. It is one of the most annoying parts of the startup narrative that technology workers who spend parts of their career building companies are taking huge risks or that it is in someway abnormal to give up salary now for deferred compensation later (every person who gets a graduate degree full time does this).

[tptacek]

In fact, the first time you raise an A round, you get more employable, even after the business fails.

It's like the opposite of betting your life.

About the worst thing you can say is that there's an opportunity cost from not starting a different more successful startup or not landing a job that would be the envy of 99% of employed Americans.

You need a scanning electron microscope to see the violin playing the sad song for VC-funded startup founders.

[waterlesscloud]

Say Tim Cook cashes out $50 million in Apple stock today. Say in a year that same stock was only worth $40 million.

Would you then say that he walked away with $10 million more than the actual value he created?

The point here is that at the time the founder cashed out his $2 million in equity, it had a value of $2 million. Not zero, not nothing. And the financiers obviously agreed, and took that equity in return.

You can't judge the deal by the direction the value took later.

[tptacek]

Sorry, but over short time frames the deal gets asymptotically easier to judge as the value approaches zero.

[jacques_chester]

It's hyperbole, fine. But the marginal value of the same million dollars to the pro investor and the founder are wildly different. To one it's a shrug, to another it's a life-changing amount of money.

I'd also be interested in seeing the expected lifetime outcomes. Taking a hit for several years, every few years, is probably not as wonderful as you're making it out to be on the average.