"Everyone good wants to be a founder" is ludicrous. 1. Most people don't have the connections to become founders without an incredible amount of work (that cou

"Everyone good wants to be a founder" is ludicrous. 1. Most people don't have the connections to become founders without an incredible amount of work (that could be better spent in, say, finance where the long hours bring 20-40% annual pay increases). For every one person who has the connections to deliver Sequoia on an idea, there are 9,999 equally talented people who don't. If you can't find one of those other 9,999, then you're without hope. 2. The problem is that non-founder equity is generally quite pathetic. If the founders each get 20% and the first engineer gets 1%, then you're never going to see a "founder-quality" first engineer. It simply won't happen. To a large extent, hiring in the Valley is about exploiting the Winner's Curse regarding the unknown value of the equity. As it were, the more talented and seasoned people tend to assign it a low value (perhaps 0.25x price-at-valuation, meaning it'd take $160k of equity on a 4-year-schedule to offset a $10k salary drop) while the clueless and young ones who haven't made their (business and technical) mistakes yet tend to overvalue it (sometimes 1+... which makes no sense because why would one pay a higher price than the VCs are paying?) Talented people would gladly take non-founder positions if the terms (equity, autonomy, introduction into the investor class) weren't so terrible. It's not like being a founder in the VC-funded world is great; it's that everything else is worse.