> Usually if an employee is staying solely or mostly because of the handcuffs, they're not producing their best work I know plenty of people with handcuffs, in

> Usually if an employee is staying solely or mostly because of the handcuffs, they're not producing their best work I know plenty of people with handcuffs, including me, and this doesn't apply to any of them. I think that claim is common but is in fact not justified in the real world. Your top performers are basically top performers for personality reasons. Sure, if your company spends 10+ years getting to liquidity, which became popular in the mid-201x because not a single one of them was even remotely financially sound and the markets weren't ready to bite that off yet, you had people staying years longer than they should have, but it is not nearly as big a problem as people claim and was, mostly, because the real value was being captured by early/founder insiders in late stage super-sized PE rounds instead of going public.