Probably something like 95%/4%/1% That's not percentage of the company - that's percentage of the equity held by employees. In some cases it might actually tur

Probably something like 95%/4%/1% That's not percentage of the company - that's percentage of the equity held by employees. In some cases it might actually turn out a bit better, like 90/5/5 or something like that. Regardless, the outcome seen by founders is orders of magnitude better than even early employees. This can be exacerbated by a bunch of games that can be played at an exit to make the disparity larger. For example, you can cancel all unvested options. Founders have likely been around longer than the employees, so they have more stock vested, plus they typically get some acceleration upon change of control. For example, imagine that a founder has 25%, and employee number 1 (who was hired 6 months after the company started) has 2%. That they sell to Google after the company has been around for 2 years, and that all unvested shares are cancelled. Employee 1 gets .75%, and the founder, who has 1 year acceleration on change of control, has 18.75%. On top of that, the founder probably gets long-term capital gains treatment because he exercised his shares immediately, where the employee didn't exercise any of his shares and treats the gain as income (if he had a 1-year cliff, he probably couldn't exercise for a year, at which point it didn't matter, because he had only held the shares for 6 months when the company was sold). So the employee ends up with 0.5% after taxes, and the founder ends up with 15.63%. Which means that he ends up doing about 30x as well as the first employee.