I agree with you in the sense that people are accepting those offers rationally. However, those employees just like the instagram and whatsapp employees got ex

I agree with you in the sense that people are accepting those offers rationally. However, those employees just like the instagram and whatsapp employees got extremely lucky. 99% of startup employees will likely not make what they could if they worked for a big tech companies like Microsoft which pay with liquid relatively minimal risk stock. My point is that startup equity is shit in all but the extremely rare unicorn cases for everyone except the founders and VC's. I always laugh when I see startups offering microscopic equity while founders horde orders of magnitude more stock acting like what they have done is worth hundreds of times more what your early employees do.