This. I think this makes the most sense. Your earliest hires took a risk as well by turning down big $$$ from Google, etc. to partake in sharing your vision and

This. I think this makes the most sense. Your earliest hires took a risk as well by turning down big $$$ from Google, etc. to partake in sharing your vision and gave you this opportunity to cash out by building your company to this point. I'm not sure what the situation looks like, but I've seen startups where the founder(s) have 50-90% of the company and then the first engineer who built the entire tech stack from the ground up has an illiquid ~1-2%. That is pure exploitation.