The whole industry is pretty simple top VC firms make a fairly large number of carefully screened deals to make sure they capture as many Unicorns as possible s

The whole industry is pretty simple top VC firms make a fairly large number of carefully screened deals to make sure they capture as many Unicorns as possible since without Unicorns the VC game is a big money looser. Of those companies that do get funded by top VCs and do not become unicorns very few will have meaningfull exists for employees. To mask this simple fact there exists a fairly powerful PR machine that feeds Startup entrepreneurs which in turn feed the same regurgitated slogans to their employees. So translating "I want employees to feel ownership and the only way to do that is to give it to them. I want them to understand that they have this asset that their hard work directly affects" in reality translates to I want you to imagine that for some magical reason you can pick a Unicorn even though top tier VC firms stuffed by brilliant people doing it full time get it right at best about 1 in 100 times? So even if your hypothetical employee is as good at picking winners as a top VC the actual value of their option is in reality 1/100th of the imaginary value at your big exit given the odds (and this is only if they are as good at picking the company as a top VC).