I used to work for a startup (employee) and I was wondering the same all the time. One of the perks of working at this company that you were allowed to speak at

I used to work for a startup (employee) and I was wondering the same all the time. One of the perks of working at this company that you were allowed to speak at as many conferences as you wanted to and everybody who worked there made good use of it. On the one hand, this was basically our primary marketing tool. We talked about our tools, other engineers saw them and convinced their companies to buy our software. On the other hand, our engineers were constantly in contact with people from big companies (Google, MS, ...) that tried to recruit them. Curiously, only one of our engineers ever left the company voluntarily (that was me, after four years), so apparently the boss managed to create a work environment that was so great that even constant top-dollar recruitment attempts by other companies had no effect.