No company will offer an employee a ratchet or any kind of anti-dilution protection in their stock package when they're hired. Fundamentally the issue here is

No company will offer an employee a ratchet or any kind of anti-dilution protection in their stock package when they're hired. Fundamentally the issue here is that cash is still king. Cash I am able to give a company right now has much more value than 4 years of my life in many cases. If you don't have a lot of ready cash, you trade the thing you do have -- your productive years. Hey, you're going to work _somewhere_, right? You might as well get some equity, too. But it's very hard to pick a winner (if it was easy everyone would be a VC), and we only have 40-50 years of labor, so a limited number of trips to the card table. Hopefully you get dealt an ace, but even pocket rockets is not always going to take the pot, as people who started at Dropbox in the last year or so are learning. I would have told you three years ago that people working at Dropbox with vested equity essentially won the lottery. Now it's not so clear...