"But what about the employees? Instead many are finding themselves churning through a series of companies built to flip, never making much money themselves and

"But what about the employees? Instead many are finding themselves churning through a series of companies built to flip, never making much money themselves and just jumping between treadmills." This sounds remarkably like what happened to my dad in the late 80s/early 90s. VCs, founders make money, employees get fired and the company gets moved to (wherever-corporate-office). This is not a new trend; to make money in an acquisition, you must be one of the people with a large stake in the company. If you are Joe Programmer, that is probably not you... so ask for a salary. It may be true that the lottery/pigeon dance effect is kind of wearing off, as there hasn't been a huge IPO (like Google's) in a while. This would make normal employees less likely to bank on a huge IPO.