Why would someone work long hours for low pay with higher risk for 0.1% of high-risk small business?
The most financial exposure these individuals have is reading the $Xmillion Series X funding, or $Xbillion exits that they see on TechCrunch on a daily basis. Their risk is assessed on those headlines.
I trusted the founder when he would make big promises for the future. He didn't bring up equity until the last moment once we already were ready to quit and join. In hindsight these are clearly common business tactics (get the person to accept before going into details), but as a young engineer I had more trust in older more experienced folks like the founder. Even when there were huge alarm bells ringing in my head, I said yes. It's hard to describe how a good salesman can have you saying yes to things you aren't comfortable with.
In the end the company crashed and burned after losing all it's founding team who all work at top companies now.
I recommend a book that describes some of these tricks pretty well. It helps protect me from such manipulation (some of the time):
https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Rober...
A: those companies aren't cool & won't make you a millionaire by 35 on stock options (whereas a startup might)