I think it depends a lot on the market you're in, how you've funded your company, and where you live. A founder of a bootstrapped, remote company in Iowa has f

I think it depends a lot on the market you're in, how you've funded your company, and where you live. A founder of a bootstrapped, remote company in Iowa has far more risk than almost any engineer in NYC or SF. Relatively speaking, if you are a not-terrible engineer in SF/NYC you can have multiple jobs competing for you within a day of your company going out of business. A non-well-off or not-well-connected founder has comparatively little opportunities to "fail up" when their company goes out of business. I'm a founder of a bootstrapped, remote company, in a non tier-1 tech city. I'm the lowest paid person in our company (of all engineers). If we go out of business, our folks will have jobs in days. I won't. Does that mean I have more risk? In a certain dimension, yes. In others, definitely not. Of course, nothing in my post suggests that early engineers shouldn't be paid reasonable salaries or have reasonable options. They should. But I don't think risk has anything to do with it - common decency does.