[dchichkov]

'a really really early employee who took basically no salary' -- this is a description of a founder.

'and instead got 1%+.' -- this is a description of somebody who had decided to work for free for some reason.

[aetherson]

Well, really, it doesn't matter how much salary they did or didn't give up for these purposes. The point is, if your initial grant is, say, 1.5%, then maybe your later grants will be pretty insignificant in comparison. But if your initial grant is 0.2%, there's no reason why you can't get significantly more stock through later grants.