Perfectly illustrated by this statement: > I have been an early or first engineer at five different companies and have had three liquidity events in a 9-year c

Perfectly illustrated by this statement: > I have been an early or first engineer at five different companies and have had three liquidity events in a 9-year career. A "big" success is a 10+ year journey. For an early employee, it is perfectly acceptable to give a few weeks' notice and move on to the next lotto ticket. This doesn't work for a key founder-exec -- they're likely going to commit to a decade working on one big problem, and investors want to incentivize them to shoot for the moon & stick with it for the long haul. It's definitively not the same for an early employee.