the ingenuity and curse of capitalism is boiling all of human value down to a number. when someone uses the phrase "business decision", that's shorthand for "le

the ingenuity and curse of capitalism is boiling all of human value down to a number. when someone uses the phrase "business decision", that's shorthand for "let's use monetary value in place of the messiness of the human condition". this generally isn't a malicious act--meant to make the task more manageable--but it does set up the board to be advantageous to the capital holder (in this case VCs, and to a somewhat lesser extent, founders). the capital holders aren't bad people per se, just that the emergent property of the system is tilted toward capital and away from labor. this is the version of capitalism as we have it now. you've implicitly accepted that game when you took a salary and an equity stake. capital holders are exceedingly motivated and practiced at squeezing value out of a transaction--that is why they got into the game in the first place. within this game, you'll need to either find leverage points (like a unique skill or asset) to get what you think you deserve, accept what you've got and appreciate your relative comfort, or find another opportunity (which is a potential leverage point in itself). (part of) the medium-term solution is to bend the regulatory environment toward fairness. things like making the capital gains tax rate the same as ordinary income, and holding corporations and executives responsible for their actions, just like regular persons. in the long-term, is there another system of figuring out who deerves what and how much? how do we allocate resources fairly so that no one feels shafted? it's the ultimate (dynamic systems) optimization problem. capitalism is attractive because it's decentralized, but is there a system better at solving this optimization problem without losing this attractive property?