At the end of the day, no matter how much equity gets passed around, it's unlikely to pay out big unless your company goes public. Too many companies attach co

At the end of the day, no matter how much equity gets passed around, it's unlikely to pay out big unless your company goes public. Too many companies attach conditions to their equity and too many acquiring investors and big companies will readily dilute employee shares to sweeten the equity deals for founders and early investors. Thats why sweating hard times out for equity is a hard sell to engineers these days. There's too many ways for equity to be worthless paper later on and there's countless examples of it happening recently (e.g. Skype, Zynga, etc).