Giving employees equity can help to keep everyone aligned to the same goals. Early on in my career, I worked at a startup that paid its employees very well but

Giving employees equity can help to keep everyone aligned to the same goals. Early on in my career, I worked at a startup that paid its employees very well but did not give them equity. When the sales team pushed through a monster deal with some vaporware in it, we technical people hated it, because for us it just meant more burning the midnight oil to deliver overpromised shit, and no additional compensation. Churn among devs was huge, the codebase eventually became weighed down by technical debt, and the company cratered after a few years. If they would've been more generous with equity (even at the expense of base salaries), I think we would've been high-fiving each other when the sales team closed a huge deal instead of cursing them under our breath and plotting our escape.